CHAPTER TEN.
THE EASY-GOING BOY.
It is a common complaint in these degenerate days that we live harder than our fathers did.

Whatever we do we rush at.

We bolt our food, and run for the train; we jump out of it before it has stopped, and reach the school door just as the bell rings; we "cram" for our examinations, and "spurt" for our prizes.

We have no time to read books, so we scuttle through the reviews, and consider ourselves up in the subject; we cut short our letters home, and have no patience to sit and hear a long story out.

We race off with a chum for a week's holiday, and consider we have dawdled unless we have covered our thirty miles a day, and can name as visited a string of sights, mountains, lakes, and valleys a full yard long.
If such charges are just (and they are, we fear, not wholly unfounded), it is at least a satisfaction to know that there is one brilliant exception to the rule, and that is in the person of Master Ned Easy.
Whatever other folk do, _he_ has no notion of hurrying himself.