MR. SAUNDERSON and Kenelm sat in the arbour: the former sipping his
grog and smoking his pipe; the latter looking forth into the summer
night skies with an earnest yet abstracted gaze, as if he were trying
to count the stars in the Milky Way.
"Ha!" said Mr. Saunderson, who was concluding an argument; "you see it
now, don't you?"
"I? not a bit of it. You tell me that your grandfather was a farmer,
and your father was a farmer, and that you have been a farmer for
thirty years; and from these premises you deduce the illogical and
irrational conclusion that therefore your son must be a farmer."
"Young man, you may think yourself very knowing 'cause you have been
at the 'Varsity, and swept away a headful of book-learning."
"Stop," quoth Kenelm. "You grant that a university is learned."
"Well, I suppose so."
"But how could it be learned if those who quitted it brought the
learning away? We leave it all behind us in the care of the tutors.
But I know what you were going to say,--that it is not because I had
read more books than you have that I was to give myself airs and
pretend to have more knowledge of life than a man of your years and
experience. Agreed, as a general rule. But does not every doctor,
however wise and skilful, prefer taking another doctor's opinion about
himself, even though that other doctor has just started in practice?
And seeing that doctors, taking them as a body, are monstrous clever
fellows, is not the example they set us worth following? Does it not
prove that no man, however wise, is a good judge of his own case?
Now, your son's case is really your case: you see it through the
medium of your likings and dislikings; and insist upon forcing a
square peg into a round hole, because in a round hole you, being a
round peg, feel tight and comfortable. Now I call that irrational."
"I don't see why my son has any right to fancy himself a square peg,"
said the farmer, doggedly, "when his father and his grandfather and
his great-grandfather have been round pegs; and it is agin' nature for
any creature not to take after its own kind. A dog is a pointer or a
sheep-dog according as its forebears were pointers or sheep-dogs.
There," cried the farmer, triumphantly, shaking the ashes out of his
pipe. "I think I have posed you, young master!"
"No; for you have taken it for granted that the breeds have not been
crossed. But suppose that a sheep-dog has married a pointer, are you
sure that his son will not be more of a pointer than a sheep-dog?"
Mr. Saunderson arrested himself in the task of refilling his pipe, and
scratched his head.
"You see," continued Kenelm, "that you have crossed the breed. You
married a tradesman's daughter, and I dare say her grandfather and
great-grandfather were tradesmen too. Now, most sons take after their
mothers, and therefore Mr. Saunderson junior takes after his kind on
the distaff side, and comes into the world a square peg, which can
only be tight and comfortable in a square hole. It is no use arguing,
Farmer: your boy must go to his uncle; and there's an end of the
matter."
"By goles!" said the farmer, "you seem to think you can talk me out of
my senses."
"No; but I think if you had your own way you would talk your son into
the workhouse."
"What! by sticking to the land like his father before him? Let a man
stick by the land, and the land will stick by him."
"Let a man stick in the mud, and the mud will stick to him. You put
your heart in your farm, and your son would only put his foot into it.
Courage! Don't you see that Time is a whirligig, and all things come
round? Every day somebody leaves the land and goes off into trade.
By and by he grows rich, and then his great desire is to get back to
the land again. He left it the son of a farmer: he returns to it as a
squire. Your son, when he gets to be fifty, will invest his savings
in acres, and have tenants of his own. Lord, how he will lay down the
law to them! I would not advise you to take a farm under him."
"Catch me at it!" said the farmer. "He would turn all the contents of
the 'pothecary's shop into my fallows, and call it 'progress.'"
"Let him physic the fallows when he has farms of his own: keep yours
out of his chemical clutches. Come, I shall tell him to pack up and
be off to his uncle's next week?"
"Well, well," said the farmer, in a resigned tone: "a wilful man must
e'en have his way."
"And the best thing a sensible man can do is not to cross it. Mr.
Saunderson, give me your honest hand. You are one of those men who
put the sons of good fathers in mind of their own; and I think of mine
when I say 'God bless you!'"
Quitting the farmer, Kenelm re-entered the house, and sought Mr.
Saunderson junior in his own room. He found that young gentleman
still up, and reading an eloquent tract on the Emancipation of the
Human Race from all Tyrannical Control,--Political, Social,
Ecclesiastical, and Domestic.
The lad looked up sulkily, and said, on encountering Kenelm's
melancholic visage, "Ah! I see you have talked with the old governor,
and he'll not hear of it."
"In the first place," answered Kenelm, "since you value yourself on a
superior education, allow me to advise you to study the English
language, as the forms of it are maintained by the elder authors,
whom, in spite of an Age of Progress, men of superior education
esteem. No one who has gone through that study; no one, indeed, who
has studied the Ten Commandments in the vernacular,--commits the
mistake of supposing that 'the old governor' is a synonymous
expression for 'father.' In the second place, since you pretend to the
superior enlightenment which results from a superior education, learn
to know better your own self before you set up as a teacher of
mankind. Excuse the liberty I take, as your sincere well-wisher, when
I tell you that you are at present a conceited fool,--in short, that
which makes one boy call another an 'ass.' But when one has a poor
head he may redeem the average balance of humanity by increasing the
wealth of the heart. Try and increase yours. Your father consents to
your choice of your lot at the sacrifice of all his own inclinations.
This is a sore trial to a father's pride, a father's affection; and
few fathers make such sacrifices with a good grace. I have thus kept
my promise to you, and enforced your wishes on Mr. Saunderson's
judgment, because I am sure you would have been a very bad farmer. It
now remains for you to show that you can be a very good tradesman.
You are bound in honour to me and to your father to try your best to
be so; and meanwhile leave the task of upsetting the world to those
who have no shop in it, which would go crash in the general tumble.
And so good-night to you."
To these admonitory words, /sacro digna silentio/, Saunderson junior
listened with a dropping jaw and fascinated staring eyes. He felt
like an infant to whom the nurse has given a hasty shake, and who is
too stupefied by that operation to know whether he is hurt or not.
A minute after Kenelm had quitted the room he reappeared at the door,
and said in a conciliatory whisper, "Don't take it to heart that I
called you a conceited fool and an ass. These terms are no doubt just
as applicable to myself. But there is a more conceited fool and a
greater ass than either of us; and that is the Age in which we have
the misfortune to be born,--an Age of Progress, Mr. Saunderson,
junior!--an Age of Prigs."