After seven years in the London office, he went to Ireland as assistant
surveyor, and thenceforward he began to enjoy his business, and to get on
in it. He was paid sixpence a mile, and he would ride forty miles a day.
He rode to hounds, incidentally, whenever he got a chance, and he kept up
the practice, with enthusiasm, to within a few years of his death. "It
will, I think, be accorded to me," he says, "that I have ridden hard. I
know very little about hunting; I am blind, very heavy, and I am now old;
but I ride with a boy's energy, hating the roads, and despising young men
who ride them; and I feel that life cannot give me anything better than
when I have gone through a long run to the finish, keeping a place, not of
glory, but of credit, among my juniors." Riding, working, having a jolly
time, and gradually increasing his income, he lived until 1842, when he
became engaged; and he was married on June 11, 1844. "I ought to name that
happy day," he declares, "as the commencement of my better life." It was
at about this date, also, that he began and finished, not without delay
and procrastination, his first novel. Curiously enough, he affirms that he
did not doubt his own intellectual sufficiency to write a readable novel:
"What I did doubt was my own industry, and the chances of a market.
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