There's no hurry about it for anybody but yourselves." The Squire's life was quite as idle as his sons', but it was a fiction kept up by himself and his contemporaries in Raveloe that youth was exclusively the period of folly, and that their aged wisdom was constantly in a state of endurance mitigated by sarcasm.

Godfrey waited, before he spoke again, until the ale had been brought and the door closed--an interval during which Fleet, the deer-hound, had consumed enough bits of beef to make a poor man's holiday dinner.
"There's been a cursed piece of ill-luck with Wildfire," he began; "happened the day before yesterday." "What! broke his knees ?" said the Squire, after taking a draught of ale.

"I thought you knew how to ride better than that, sir.

I never threw a horse down in my life.

If I had, I might ha' whistled for another, for _my_ father wasn't quite so ready to unstring as some other fathers I know of.