have made a parson of him. 'I'd rather enlist for a soldier,' Nevil
said, and he ceased to dream of rebellion, and of his little property of
a few thousand pounds in the funds to aid him in it. He confessed to his
dear friend Rosamund Culling that he thought the parsons happy in having
time to read history. And oh, to feel for certain which side was the
wrong side in our Civil War, so that one should not hesitate in choosing!
Such puzzles are never, he seemed to be aware, solved in a midshipman's
mess. He hated bloodshed, and was guilty of the 'cotton-spinners'
babble,' abhorred of Everard, in alluding to it. Rosamund liked him for
his humanity; but she, too, feared he was a slack Romfrey when she heard
him speak in precocious contempt of glory. Somewhere, somehow, he had
got hold of Manchester sarcasms concerning glory: a weedy word of the
newspapers had been sown in his bosom perhaps. He said: 'I don't care to
win glory; I know all about that; I 've seen an old hat in the Louvre.'
And he would have had her to suppose that he had looked on the
campaigning head-cover of Napoleon simply as a shocking bad, bald, brown-
rubbed old tricorne rather than as the nod of extinction to thousands,
the great orb of darkness, the still-trembling gloomy quiver--the brain
of the lightnings of battles.

Now this boy nursed no secret presumptuous belief that he was fitted for
the walks of the higher intellect; he was not having his impudent boy's
fling at superiority over the superior, as here and there a subtle-minded
vain juvenile will; nor was he a parrot repeating a line from some
Lancastrian pamphlet. He really disliked war and the sword; and scorning
the prospect of an idle life, confessing that his abilities barely
adapted him for a sailor's, he was opposed to the career opened to him
almost to the extreme of shrinking and terror. Or that was the
impression conveyed to a not unsympathetic hearer by his forlorn efforts
to make himself understood, which were like the tappings of the stick of