He broke the ice by informing me that I had confirmed him, and that perhaps I should like to know that he had turned out better than he expected." "How like Dick!" said Hester.
"I remembered him at last.

His father was the squire of Farlow, where I was rector before I came to Southminster.

Dick was not a source of unmixed pleasure to his parents.

As a boy of eight he sowed the parental billiard-table with mustard and cress in his father's absence, and raised a very good crop, and performed other excruciating experiments.

I believe he beat all previous records of birch rods at Eton.