spoke of making me his heir--or words to that effect neatly conjugated--
before you came back; and rather than be a curate like that Reverend Hart
of yours, who hands raisins and almonds, and orange-flower biscuits to
your aunt the way of all the Reverends who drop down on Riversley--I 'd
betray my bosom friend. I'm regularly "hoist on my own petard," as they
say in the newspapers. I'm a curate and no mistake. You did it with a
turn of the wrist, without striking out: and I like neat boxing. I bear
no malice when I'm floored neatly.'

Five minutes after he had spoken it would have been impossible for me to
tell him that my simplicity and not my cleverness had caused his
overthrow. From this I learnt that simplicity is the keenest weapon and
a beautiful refinement of cleverness; and I affected it extremely. I
pushed it so far that I could make the squire dance in his seat with
suppressed fury and jealousy at my way of talking of Venice, and other
Continental cities, which he knew I must have visited in my father's
society; and though he raged at me and pshawed the Continent to the
deuce, he was ready, out of sheer rivalry, to grant anything I pleased to
covet. At every stage of my growth one or another of my passions was
alert to twist me awry, and now I was getting a false self about me and
becoming liker to the creature people supposed me to be, despising them
for blockheads in my heart, as boys may who preserve a last trace of the
ingenuousness denied to seasoned men.

Happily my aunt wrote to Mr. Rippenger for the address of little Gus
Temple's father, to invite my schoolfellow to stay a month at Riversley.
Temple came, everybody liked him; as for me my delight was unbounded, and
in spite of a feeling of superiority due to my penetrative capacity, and
the suspicion it originated, that Temple might be acting the plain well-
bred schoolboy he was, I soon preferred his pattern to my own. He