It Is Never Too Late to Mend

by Charles Reade


This attempt at a solid fiction is, with their permission, dedicated
to the President, Fellows, and demies of St. Mary Magdalen College.
Oxford, by a grateful son of that ancient, learned, and most
charitable house.



CHAPTER I.

GEORGE FIELDING cultivated a small farm in Berkshire.

This position is not so enviable as it was. Years ago, the farmers of
England, had they been as intelligent as other traders, could have
purchased the English soil by means of the huge percentage it offered
them.

But now, I grieve to say, a farmer must be as sharp as his neighbors,
or like his neighbors he will break. What do I say? There are soils
and situations where, in spite of intelligence and sobriety, he is
almost sure to break; just as there are shops where the lively, the
severe, the industrious, the lazy, are fractured alike.

This last fact I make mine by perambulating a certain great street
every three months, and observing how name succeeds to name as wave to
wave.