The expected pleasures of fanning will be likely to disappoint, even more than its profits.  When the fields are waving with abundance, nothing appears more delightful than to direct the labours they require; but the enjoyments of the harvest month, when all the weary toil of preparation is forgotten, will be found a poor compensation for the daily annoyances of the year.  To be excelled in management by the uneducated, and over-reached by the cunning:  to study systems of agriculture, to be thwarted in carrying them into effect, and when they fail, to become an object of contemptuous pity to the ignorant but successful followers of the old routine:  to find that all around take advantage of his ignorance:  that servants, the best with other masters, become careless and unfaithful with him:  to become involved in petty disputes with low neighbours, and to be unable to avoid them except by a forbearance which encourages aggression:  to find, that with all his attention and trouble, the income lags far behind the outgoings—­those are among the pleasures of a gentleman farmer.

To Captain Pellew, the employment was peculiarly unsuitable.  His mind, happy only while it was active, could ill accommodate itself to pursuits which almost forbade exertion; and a business within the comprehension of a peasant was not for a character which could fill, and animate, with its own energy an extended sphere of action.  Even now, when agriculture has become an eminently scientific profession, it requires to make it interesting that it shall be thoroughly understood, and conducted upon a proper scale; but at that time it was commonly a mere routine of dull drudgery, and nowhere more so than in the west of Cornwall.  To have an object in view, yet be unable to advance it by any exertions of his own, was to him a source of constant irritation.  He was wearied with the imperceptible growth of his crops, and complained that he made his eyes ache by watching their daily progress.  He was not likely to excel in occupations so entirely uncongenial.  The old people in the neighbourhood of Treverry speak with wonder of the fearlessness he displayed on different occasions, but shake their heads at his management as a farmer.  They have no difficulty in accounting for his fortune.  While he lived at Treverry, a swarm of bees found an entrance over the porch, of the house, and made a comb there for many successive years; and to this happy omen they attribute all his after success.  The apartment is still called the “bee-room.”

The offer of a command in the Russian navy gave him an opportunity to escape from his difficulties.  It was recommended to him by an officer of high character, with whom he had served, and who possessed so many claims upon his confidence that he thought it right to strengthen his own decision by the opinion of his elder brother, before he finally refused it.  His brother, who had always encouraged his every ambitious, and every honourable feeling, and who, even at this