Besides these three instructors, the
girls had their dancing-master, an Englishman who pretended to impart
not only the best-approved steps of a London assembly-room, but its
manners and graces as well.
So much for the education of the girls, Philip, and myself. Ned
Faringfield's was interrupted by his expulsion from King's for gross
misconduct; and was terminated by his disgrace at Yale College
(whither his father had sent him in vain hope that he might behave
better away from home and more self-dependent) for beating a smaller
student whom he had cheated at a clandestine game of cards. His
home-coming on this occasion was followed by his being packed off to
Virginia to play at superintending his father's tobacco plantations.
Neglecting this business to go shooting on the frontier, he got a
Scotch Presbyterian mountaineer's daughter into trouble; and when he
turned up again at the door in Queen Street, he was still shaky with
recollections of the mob of riflemen that had chased him out of
Virginia. That piece of sport cost his father a pretty penny, and
resulted in a place being got for Ned with a merchant who was Mr.
Faringfield's correspondent in the Barbadoes. So to the tropics the
young gentleman was shipped, with sighs of relief at his embarkation,
and--I have no doubt--with unuttered prayers that he might not show
his face in Queen Street for a long time to come. Already he had got
the name, in the family, of "the bad shilling," for his always coming
back unlooked for.
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