CHAPTER II.
Monsieur "La destinee a deux manieres de nous briser; en se refusant a nos desirs et en les accomplissant." To some the night brings wiser or at all events a second counsel.

For myself, however, it has never been so.

In the prosecution of such small enterprises as have marked a life no more eventful than those around it, I have always awakened in the morning of the same mind as I was when sleep laid its quiet hand upon me.

It seems, moreover, that I have made just as many as but no more mistakes than my neighbours.
Taking it likewise as a broad generality, the balance seems, in my experience, to tell quite perceptibly in favour of those who make up their minds and hold to that decision firmly, rather than towards such men as seek counsel of the multitude and trim their sail to the tame breeze of precedent.
"Always go straight for a jump," my father had shouted to me once, years ago, while I sat up in a Norfolk ditch and watched my horse disappear through a gap in the next hedge.
I awoke on the morning after the centenary fetes without any doubt in my mind--being still determined to seek a situation for which I was unfitted.
Having quarrelled with my father, who obstinately refused to pay a few debts such as no young man living in London could, with self-respect, avoid, I was still in the enjoyment of a small annual income left to me by a mother whom I had never seen--upon whose grave in the old, disused churchyard at Hopton I had indeed been taught to lay a few flowers before I fully realised the meaning of such tribute.

That my irate old sire had threatened to cut me off with as near an approach to one shilling as an entail would allow had not given me much anxiety.