He cared less for any books that strained his faculties a little--less for engravings and sculptures--perhaps more for pictures.

He spent extravagantly on his horses; "thought of eating and drinking." There was no open vice in all this, so that any awful temptation to crime should come down upon him, and startle him out of his mode of thinking and living; half the people about him did much the same, as far as their lives were patent to his unreflecting observation.

But most of his associates had their duties to do, and did them with a heart and a will, in the hours when he was not in their company.

Yes! I call them duties, though some of them might be self-imposed and purely social; they were engagements they had entered into, either tacitly or with words, and that they fulfilled.

From Mr.
Hetherington, the Master of the Hounds, who was up at--no one knows what hour, to go down to the kennel and see that the men did their work well and thoroughly, to stern old Sir Lionel Playfair, the upright magistrate, the thoughtful, conscientious landlord--they did their work according to their lights; there were few laggards among those with whom Mr.Wilkins associated in the field or at the dinner-table.