"Yes, sir," said Godfrey, "I've had my breakfast, but I was
waiting to speak to you."

"Ah! well," said the Squire, throwing himself indifferently into
his chair, and speaking in a ponderous coughing fashion, which was
felt in Raveloe to be a sort of privilege of his rank, while he cut
a piece of beef, and held it up before the deer-hound that had come
in with him. "Ring the bell for my ale, will you? You youngsters'
business is your own pleasure, mostly. There's no hurry about it
for anybody but yourselves."

The Squire's life was quite as idle as his sons', but it was a
fiction kept up by himself and his contemporaries in Raveloe that
youth was exclusively the period of folly, and that their aged
wisdom was constantly in a state of endurance mitigated by sarcasm.
Godfrey waited, before he spoke again, until the ale had been
brought and the door closed--an interval during which Fleet, the
deer-hound, had consumed enough bits of beef to make a poor man's
holiday dinner.

"There's been a cursed piece of ill-luck with Wildfire," he began;
"happened the day before yesterday."

"What! broke his knees?" said the Squire, after taking a draught
of ale. "I thought you knew how to ride better than that, sir.
I never threw a horse down in my life. If I had, I might ha'
whistled for another, for _my_ father wasn't quite so ready to
unstring as some other fathers I know of. But they must turn over a
new leaf--_they_ must. What with mortgages and arrears, I'm as