The shrewdness of the calculation struck me at once.
"You will take another farm when one can be had on easier terms than now, I suppose?"
"Yes; if I can manage it. And I _will_ manage it. Between ourselves, after all the old man's debts are paid, I shall only have about nine or ten hundred pounds to the good, even by selling at the present tremendous rates; so it was time, you see, I pulled up, and rubbed the fog out of my eyes a bit. And hark ye, Master Sharp!" he added, as we rose and shook hands with each other--"I have now done _playing_ with the world--it's a place of work and business; and I'll do my share of it so effectually, that my children, if I have any, shall, if I do not, reach the class of landed gentry; and this you'll find, for all your sneering, will come about all the more easily that neither they nor their father will be encumbered with much educational lumber. Good-by."
I did not again see my old school-fellow till the change he had predicted had thoroughly come to pass. Farms were every where to let, and a general cry to parliament for aid rang through the land. Dutton called at the office upon business, accompanied by a young woman of remarkable personal comeliness, but, as a very few sentences betrayed, little or no education in the conventional sense of the word. She was the daughter of a farmer, whom--it was no fault of hers--a change of times had not found in a better condition for weathering them.--Anne Mosley, in fact, was a thoroughly industrious, clever farm economist. The instant Dutton had secured an eligible farm, at his own price and conditions, he married her; and now, on the third day after the wedding, he had brought me the draft of his lease for examination.
"You are not afraid, then," I remarked, "of taking a farm in these bad times?"
"Not I--at a price. We mean to _rough_ it, Mr. Sharp," he added gayly. "And, let me tell you, that those who will stoop to do that--I mean, take their coats off, tuck up their sleeves, and fling appearances to the winds--may, and will, if they understand their business, and have got their heads screwed on right, do better here than in any of the uncleared countries they talk so much about. You know what I told you down at Romford. Well, we'll manage that before our hair is gray, depend upon it, bad as the times may be--won't we, Nance?"