above whose heads the fluttered angels seemed entangled in the host of
pennons flaunting round the cross. Cloom was a house of neglected
glories, of fine things fallen on base uses, like the family itself.
When James Ruan came into his inheritance it was still a gentleman's
estate; when he died it was a mere farm. A distorted habit of mind and
the incredible difficulties of communication in the remote West during
the first half of the nineteenth century had gradually caused James Ruan
to sink his gentlehood in a wilful boorishness that left him a fierce
pride of race and almost feudal powers, but the tastes and habits of his
own labourers. As for the life of his mind, it was concentrated entirely
on money-making; and all that he made he invested, till he became the
most important landowner for miles, and in a district where no farms
were very large his manor lands and cottage property and his nine
hundred pounds or so of income made him a figure not to be ignored.

Nevertheless, for all his prosperity, he was a hard master, paying his
labourers, who were mostly married men with families, the wage of seven
shillings a week, and employing their womenfolk at hoeing or binding for
sixpence a day, while for fewer pence still the little children stumbled
on uncertain legs after the birds which threatened the new-tilled crops.
By such means--common to all his neighbours at a time when cultivation
was slow and such luxuries as meat, white bread, bedding, and coal were
unknown to the poor, and by a shrewdness peculiar to himself--did James
Ruan manage to make his property contribute to his private income, a
condition of affairs by no means inevitable in farming, although at that
time the hated Corn Law, only repealed soon after Ishmael's birth, had
for thirty years been in force for the benefit of landowners. If the
Squire had known the worth of the old family portraits hanging in what
had been the banqueting hall, where apples were now stored, he would
doubtless have sold them, but he had cut himself off from civilised