He had found Julius in possession of the caretaker at his guardian's house, and had begged her to let him have him.
"Which way are we going, Julius ?" inquired the dog's master, leaning upon his elbow, and giving no sign which the dog could possibly construe into a suggestion.
Julius was far too deep an animal not to see through an artless design like this.

But for all that he undertook the task of choosing.

He rose from his bed, shook himself, rubbed a few early flies off his face, and then, taking up the bundle in his teeth, with a rather contemptuous sniff, walked sedately off, in the direction of the North Pole.
Jeffreys dutifully followed; and thus it was that one of the most momentous turns in his life was taken in the footsteps of a dog.
Let us leave him, reader, tramping aimlessly thus o'er moor and fell, and hill and dale, leaving behind him the smoke of the cotton country and the noisy shriek of the railway, and losing himself among the lonely valleys and towering hills of Westmoreland--let us leave him, footsore, hungry, and desponding, and refresh ourselves in some more cheery scene and amidst livelier company.
Where shall we go?
for we can go anywhere.

That's one of the few little privileges of the storyteller.

Suppose, for instance, we take farewell of humble life altogether for a while, and invite ourselves into some grand mansion, where not by the remotest possibility could Jeffreys or Jeffreys' affairs be of the very slightest interest.
What do you say to this tempting-looking mansion, marked in the map as Wildtree Towers, standing in a park of I should not like to say how many acres, on the lower slopes of one of the grandest mountains in the Lake country?
On the beautiful summer afternoon on which we first see it, it certainly looks one of the fairest spots in creation.