had no aroma for him unless there were good new resolutions in its representatives. As a balance to these austerities, when he went to London to see what the world was like, he was carried off his head, and nearly entrapped by a woman much older than himself, though luckily he returned 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 entering a mundane profession in the impracticability of the spiritual one. But something had to be done; 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 calling which would probably afford an independence without the sacrifice of what he valued even more than a competency—intellectual liberty.
233
