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Reade, Charles, 1814-1884

"A Terrible Temptation A Story of To-Day"

Let his tutor take him to all
Quarter Sessions and Assizes, and stick to him like diaculum,
especially out-of-doors; order him never to be admitted to the
stable-yard; dismiss every biped there that lets him come. Don't let
him visit his nurse so often, and never without his tutor; it was she
who taught him to look forward to your decease; that is just like these
common women. Such a tutor as I have described will deserve 500 pounds
a year. Give it him; and dismiss him if he plays humdrum and doesn't
earn it. Dismiss half a dozen, if necessary, till you get a fellow with
a grain or two of genius for tuition. When the boy is seventeen, what
with his Oriental precocity, and this system of education, he will know
the world as well as a Saxon boy of twenty-one, and that is not saying
much. Then, if his nature is still as wild, get him a large tract in
Australia; cattle to breed, kangaroos to shoot, swift horses to thread
the bush and gallop mighty tracts; he will not shirk business, if it
avoids the repulsive form of sitting down in-doors, and offers itself
in combination with riding, hunting, galloping, cracking of rifles, and
of colonial whips as loud as rifles, and drinking sunshine and
moonshine in that mellow clime, beneath the Southern Cross and the
spangled firmament of stars unknown to us.


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