A small squireen, cursed with six or seven hundreds a year of his own, never sent to school, college, or into the army, he had grown up in a narrow circle of squireens like himself, without an object save that of gratifying his animal passions; and had about six years before, being then just of age, settled in life by marrying his housemaid--the only wise thing, perhaps, he ever did.

For she, a clever and determined woman, kept him, though not from drunkenness and debt, at least from delirium tremens and ruin, and was, in her rough, vulgar way, his guardian angel--such a one at least, as he was worthy of.

More than once has one seen the same seeming folly turn out in practice as wise a step as could well have been taken; and the coarse nature of the man, which would have crushed and ill-used a delicate and high-minded wife, subdued to something like decency by a help literally meet for it.
There was a pause.

Trebooze fancied, and wisely, that the Doctor was a cleverer man than he, and of course would want to show it.

So, after the fashion of a country squireen, he felt a longing to "set him down." "He's been a traveller, they say," thought he in that pugnacious, sceptical spirit which is bred, not, as twaddlers fancy, by too extended knowledge, but by the sense of ignorance, and a narrow sphere of thought, which makes a man angry and envious of any one who has seen more than he.
"Buffalo bulls ?" said he, half contemptuously; "what do you know about buffalo bulls ?" "I was one once myself," said Tom, "where I lived before." Trebooze swore.