ng a great fool of myself.

The most egregious act of folly, I think, a man can be guilty of, is
to allow himself to meet with "a refusal."

We may easily have tact enough to know, beforehand, the real state and
probable result of the case.

In the present one, this girl and her family would have seen me at the
bottom of the Red Sea, ere my hopes and wishes on the subject had met
with, "a consummation so devoutly to be wished."

Two days afterwards, I was standing once more on the deck of a
steamer, with my carpet-bag at my feet, bound for a foreign port.

The Church I have resigned for ever--my parish, Winthra Park, both
deserted--and my humble abode! "its hearth is desolate."

BOOK THE THIRD.

CHAPTER I.

We are aware that, when we "train up a child in the way he should go,
he will not depart from it;" but fortunately, when it is that in which
he ought not to go, he certainly will depart from it when he can.

Thus having consumed nearly half my life--at all events, the _better_
half--at a public school and the University, preparatory to a
profession, my antipathy for which was exactly proportioned by my
inaptitude for it, the sole result is, that I can now answer to the
definition of a real gentleman, "one who has no visible means of a
maintenance."

I begin to suspect, then, that it may be, now and then, just worth
while to condescend and observe how a child's disposition may incline
him to go; and though, as an humble disciple of John Locke, I am quite
sensible of the absurdity of "innate ideas," yet it is very evident
that, at an early period of our lives, we evince traits which are
infallibly indicative of the bent of our dispositions, which are just
as our natures may have been constituted, and this bent is better
known by the name of genius.

Now it has been beneficently, and I will say beautifully ordained,
that an individual, by gratifying this instinctive impulse of his
genius, not only augments his own happiness, but that of his species
also, and, I sometimes fondly hope, even that of the Creator himself.

Over an extent of country is distributed a variety of soils, one
adapted for one kind of produce, another for another, and the
aggregate may amount to so much. Counteract this arrangement, and
surely the result will be far inferior. Indeed, where is the
agriculturist who is not strictly attentive as well as acquiescent to
this tendency?

How exactly, then, do I imagine this to ap