The wildest dreamer of those days never anticipated that, in the passage of one brief generation, social advancement should be for the shrewdly ignorant rather than for the scholar: that it would be better for a man that his mind be stored with knowledge of the world than the wisdom of the classics: that the successful grocer might find a kinder welcome in a palace than the scholar: that the manufacturer of kitchen utensils might feed with kings and speak to them, without aspirates, between the courses.
Parson Marvin knew none of these things, however; nor suspected that the advance of civilisation is not always progressive, but that she may take hands with vulgarity and dance down-hill, as she does to-day.

His one scheme of life for Sep was that he should be sent to the ancient school where field-sports are cultivated to-day and English gentlemen turned upon the world more ignorant than any other gentlemen in the universe.
Then, of course, Sep must go to that College with which his father's life had been so closely allied.

And if it please God to call him to the Church, and the College should remember that it had given his father a living, and do the same by him--for that reason and no other--then, of course, Sep would be a made man.
And the making of Sep had been in progress during the winter day that a fog-bank came in from the North Sea and clung tenaciously to the low, surfless coast.

In the afternoon the sun broke through at last, wintry and pale.

Sep, who, by some instinct--the instinct, it is to be supposed, of young animals--knew that he was destined to be of a generation that should cultivate ignorance out of doors, rather than learning by the fireside, threw aside his books and cried out that he could no longer breathe in his father's study.
So Paid Marvin went off, alone, to visit a distant parishioner--one who was dying by himself out on the marsh, in a cottage cut off from all the world in a spring tide.
"Don't forget that it is high tide at five o'clock, and that there is no moon, and that the dykes will be full.