regiment to India, or that Miss Mabel had gone to stay with her aunt at
the West Moor, or, that Miss Ella was coming home from school for
altogether next month. All this cross-questioning was carried on without
the least vulgarity. The people were really anxious to hear news of the
boys and girls who had grown up amongst them, and they thought it would
please the Squire if they treated him as a sort of Patriarch.

The old man lived for nearly a century in the one place. It may be said
that not long before he died he wagered that he would reach his
hundredth year, but he missed that by three years. His whole energy and
thought were devoted to improving his estate. He had no notion of art or
things of that kind, yet he managed to make his village and its
surroundings very beautiful by long years of care. The sleepy place
where he lived was right away from the currents of modern life. If you
walked over a mile of moorland, then through five miles of deep wood,
where splendid elms and fine beeches made shade for you, you would come
at last to some rising ground, and, if you waited, you might see far
away the trailing smoke of a train. But there are men now, on the
Squire's estate, who have never seen an engine, and there must be a
score or so of the population who have never slept one night away from
their native place. While Mr. Pitt was breaking his heart over
Austerlitz; while Napoleon was playing his last throw at Waterloo; while
the Birmingham men were threatening to march on London, the Squire was
riding peacefully day by day, in the lanes and spinneys of his lovely
countryside. He never would allow a stranger to settle on his property,
and he was never quite pleased if any of the fisher girls married
pitmen. He did not mind when the hinds and the fishers intermarried, but
anything that suggested noise and smoke was an abhorrence to him, and
thus he disliked the miners. A splendid seam of coal ran beneath his
land. This coal could have been easily won; in fact, at the place where