of the same opinion, and did not bestow much care on a person
who had no chance of being a bishop; and finally, the head of St John's,
in the most open and independent manner imaginable, wrote a letter to my
anxious parent, putting an end to any hopes he might have entertained of
my being senior wrangler, or even the wooden spoon, by informing him
that he considered I was qualified--if I devoted my energies entirely to
the subject--to plant cabbages; but with regard to Euclid, it was quite
out of the question. Whether I might have arrived at any eminence in the
praiseworthy pursuit alluded to by the learned Head, I do not know, as
horticulture never was my taste; but his observations on the subject of
Euclid were undeniably correct. I never got up to the asses' bridge, and
certainly could not have passed it if I had; so, in a very disconsolate
frame of mind, I took leave of the university after two terms'
residence, and returned to Rayleigh Court--an old dilapidated
manor-house, which had been in possession of our family even since it
began to fall into disrepair; which, judging from the crooked walls and
tottering chimneys, must have been some time in the reign of the
Plantagenets. I was an only son, and my father spoiled me--not, as only
sons are usually spoiled, by too much indulgence, but by the most
persevering and incessant system of bullying that ever made a poor
mortal miserable. He first cowed and terrified me into nervousness, and
called me a coward; then he thrashed and threatened me into stupidity,
and called me a fool: so that at eighteen there are few young persons of
these degenerate days who have so humble and true an opinion of
themselves, as I had had dinned into me from my earliest years.

I slunk about the old court-yard of the house, or lay behind stacks in
the farm-yard, or sat whole days in a deserted attic, and never went
willingly near my father--the only other inhabitant of the mansion--and
was never enquired after by him. If I saw him, I trembled--if I heard
his voice, I felt inclined to fly to the other end of the house; and at
last, if I heard any one else speak a little louder than ordinary, I was
fain to betake me to some distant room, or even hide in a tangled
plantation called the Wilderness, at the other end of the park. The
house was immensely large, or rather the property was immensely small;
farm after farm had been sold by great-grandfathers and grandfathers;
but as they had not the