Of one of the daughters, now dead, it was reported that, having on one occasion discovered her father, then an old infirm man, sitting calmly by the fire beside the prostrate form of his wife whom he had just felled with his crutch, she had taken off her wooden shoe and given her father a clout on the head, which left his gray hair streaming with blood; after which she had calmly put the horse into the cart, and driven off to fetch the doctor to both her parents.

But among this grim and earthy crew, there was one exception, a 'hop out of kin,' of whom all the rest made sport.

This was the second son, Richard, who showed such a persistent tendency to 'book-larnin', 'and such a persistent idiocy in all matters pertaining to the land, that nothing was left to the father at last but to send him with many oaths to the grammar school at Whinborough.

From the moment the boy got a footing in the school he hardly cost his father another penny.

He got a local bursary which paid his school expenses, he never missed a remove or failed to gain a prize, and finally won a close scholarship which carried him triumphantly to Queen's College.
His family watched his progress with a gaping, half-contemptuous amazement, till he announced himself as safely installed at Oxford, having borrowed from a Whinborough patron the modest sum necessary to pay his college valuation--a sum which wild horses could not have dragged out of his father, now sunk over head and ears in debt and drink.
From that moment they practically lost sight of him.