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Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant

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Title: A Country Gentleman and his Family

Author: Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant

Release Date: January 2, 2010 [EBook #30835]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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A COUNTRY GENTLEMAN
AND HIS FAMILY

BY

MRS. OLIPHANT

AUTHOR OF 'THE WIZARD'S SON,' 'HESTER,' ETC.

London

MACMILLAN AND CO.

AND NEW YORK

1887

_All rights reserved_

_Printed (3 Vols. Crown 8vo) by_ R. & R. CLARK, _1886_.
_Printed, Crown 8vo, 1 Vol., 1887._

A COUNTRY GENTLEMAN.

CHAPTER I.

Theodore Warrender was still at Oxford when his father died. He was a
youth who had come up from his school with the highest hopes of what he
was to do at the university. It had indeed been laid out for him by an
admiring tutor with anticipations which were almost certainties: "If you
will only work as well as you have done these last two years!" These
years had been spent in the dignified ranks of Sixth Form, where he had
done almost everything that boy can do. It was expected that the School
would have had a holiday when he and Brunson went up for the scholarships
in their chosen college, and everybody calculated on the "double event."
Brunson got the scholarship in question, but Warrender failed, which at
first astonished everybody, but was afterwards more than accounted for
by the fact that his fine and fastidious mind had been carried away by
the AEschylus paper, which he made into an exhaustive analysis of the
famous trilogy, to the neglect of other less inviting subjects. His
tutor was thus almost more proud of him for having failed than if he
had succeeded, and Sixth Form in general accepted Brunson's success
apologetically as that of an "all-round" man, whose triumph did not mean
so much. But if there is any place where the finer scholarship ought to
tell, it should be in Oxford, and his school tutor, as has been said,
laid out for him a sort of li