At Christmas he would leave the school at which he had won his appointment with so much trouble, and go into an open profession.

Indeed he had chosen his profession, and his mode of entering it.

He would become a civil engineer, and perhaps a land surveyor, and with this view he would enter himself as a pupil in the great house of Beilby & Burton.
The terms even had been settled.

He was to pay a premium of five hundred pounds and join Mr.Burton, who was settled in the town of Stratton, for twelve months before he placed himself in Mr.Beilby's office in London.
Stratton was less than twenty miles from Clavering.

It was a comfort to him to think that he could pay this five hundred pounds out of his own earnings, without troubling his father.