un he had to
bring was a single-barrelled muzzle-loader which had belonged to his
father. With this he had shot water-rats, sparrows, and, on one
occasion when they were very numerous, fieldfares; but not flying--he
had never attempted that. No; he had stalked his small bird till he got
within thirty yards of the bough where it was perched, and taken a
steady pot-shot. As for riding, when a very little boy during his
father's lifetime he had had a pony; and two or three times since, when
staying at watering-places in the summer, he had mounted a hired hack.
So that his ideas of sport were gathered entirely from books and
pictures, to which, when they treated of that subject, he was devotedly
attached. What happy hours he had spent poring over _Jorrock's Hunts,
Mr Sponge's Sporting Tour_, and the works of the _Old Shekarry_! When
he went to a picture-gallery he was listless until he came upon some
representation of moving adventure by flood or field, and then the rest
of the party could hardly drag him away. He had a little collection of
coloured prints in his room at home, gathered at various times, and
highly esteemed by him, which conveyed a somewhat exaggerated idea of
equine powers. For in one a horse was clearing a stream about the width
of the Thames at Reading, and in another an animal of probably the same
breed was flying a solid stone wall quite ten feet high. Now he was to
have a little taste of these often-dreamed-of joys, and the idea
absorbed his thoughts and made him restless at night.

To do him justice, he did not think about it on first meeting his mother
and sisters when he went home; but on the second day of his return the
invitation and all it promised came back to him, and he broached the
matter to Mrs Crawley at breakfast-time. "Please, Mother, I have had
an invitation to spend a week with a school-fellow after Christmas."

"Oh, and who is he?" asked Mrs Crawley.

"A chap named Gould; they are awfully rich people--just the sort I ought
to know, you know. They live in Suffolk at a place called Nugget
Towers."

"And what sort of boy is he? Because, of course, Vincent, we must ask
him here in the summer in return."

"Well, he is always very civil to me, and I don't know any harm of him;
but he is not good at games and that, and not much fun to talk to--so I
have never been quite so thick with him as he wished. That makes it all
the more civil of him. He must have talked about me at h