speck on the hill over there? You could see if you had a telescope.
Daddy showed me once; but you must shut your eye. That is Quarley
Beacon, where Aunt Cissy lives."

"No, she does not, stupid," cried Harold, now suspended, head downwards,
by one foot, from the topmost rail of the gate. "No one lives there. She
lives in Quarley Manor, just behind."

Denis replied indirectly to the discourteous tone of this speech by
trying with the point of his own foot to dislodge that by which Harold
maintained his remarkable position, and a scuffle ensued, wherein,
though a non-combatant, I seemed likely to get the worst, when their
attention was fortunately diverted by the sight of Tip sneaking off, and
evidently with the vilest motives, towards the covert.

My memory was haunted that day by certain words spoken seven months ago
by Atherley, and by me at the time very ungraciously received:

"Remember, if you do come a cropper, it will go hard with you, old man;
you can't shoot or hunt or fish off the blues, like other men."

No, nor could I work them off, as some might have done. I possessed no
distinct talents, no marked vocation. If there was nothing behind and
beyond all this, what an empty freak of destiny my life would have
been--full, not even of sound and fury, but of dull common-place
suffering: a tale told by an idiot with a spice of malice in him.

Then the view before me made itself felt, as a gentle persistent sound
might have done: a flat, almost featureless scene--a little village
church with cottages and gardens clustering about it, straggling away