Summers and winters slipped by lazily enough, as the years seemed always to crawl round at Norton Bury.

How things went in the outside world I little knew or cared.

My father lived his life, mechanical and steady as clock-work, and we two, John Halifax and Phineas Fletcher, lived our lives--the one so active and busy, the other so useless and dull.

Neither of us counted the days, nor looked backwards or forwards.
One June morning I woke to the consciousness that I was twenty years old, and that John Halifax was--a man: the difference between us being precisely as I have expressed it.
Our birthdays fell within a week of each other, and it was in remembering his--the one which advanced him to the dignity of eighteen--that I called to mind my own.

I say, "advanced him to the dignity"-- but in truth that is an idle speech; for any dignity which the maturity of eighteen may be supposed to confer he had already in possession.