Title:  It Is Never Too Late to Mend

Author:  Charles Reade

Edition:  10

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

Release Date:  November, 2003 [Etext #4606] [Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on February 18, 2002]

The Project Gutenberg Etext of It Is Never Too Late to Mend, by Charles Reade
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It Is Never Too Late to Mend

by Charles Reade

This attempt at a solid fiction is, with their permission, dedicated to the President, Fellows, and demies of St. Mary Magdalen College.  Oxford, by a grateful son of that ancient, learned, and most charitable house.

CHAPTER I.

George Fielding cultivated a small farm in Berkshire.

This position is not so enviable as it was.  Years ago, the farmers of England, had they been as intelligent as other traders, could have purchased the English soil by means of the huge percentage it offered them.

But now, I grieve to say, a farmer must be as sharp as his neighbors, or like his neighbors he will break.  What do I say?  There are soils and situations where, in spite of intelligence and sobriety, he is almost sure to break; just as there are shops where the lively, the severe, the industrious, the lazy, are fractured alike.

This last fact I make mine by perambulating a certain great street every three months, and observing how name succeeds to name as wave to wave.

Readers hardened by the Times will not perhaps go so far as to weep over a body of traders for being reduced to the average condition of all other traders.  But the individual trader, who fights for existence against unfair odds, is to be pitied whether his shop has plate glass or a barn door to it; and he is the more to be pitied when he is sober, intelligent, proud, sensitive, and unlucky.

George Fielding was all these, who, a few years ago, assisted by his brother William, filled “The Grove”—­as nasty a little farm as any in Berkshire.