The material
distinctions of rank and wealth he increasingly despised. Even the
"good old family" (to use a favourite phrase of a late local worthy)
had no aroma for him unless there were good new resolutions in its
representatives. As a balance to these austerities, when he went to
live in London to see what the world was like, and with a view to
practising a profession or business there, he was carried off his
head, and nearly entrapped by a woman much older than himself, though
luckily he escaped not greatly the worse for the experience.
Early association with country solitudes had bred in him an
unconquerable, and almost unreasonable, aversion to modern town life,
and shut him out from such success as he might have aspired to by
following a mundane calling in the impracticability of the spiritual
one. But something had to be done; he had wasted many valuable
years; and having an acquaintance who was starting on a thriving life
as a Colonial farmer, it occurred to Angel that this might be a lead
in the right direction. Farming, either in the Colonies, America, or
at home--farming, at any rate, after becoming well qualified for the
business by a careful apprenticeship--that was a vocation which would
probably afford an independence without the sacrifice of what he
valued even more than a competency--intellectual liberty.
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