II. SOMEBODY KNOCKS AND COMES IN

Miller Loveday was the representative of an ancient family of
corn-grinders whose history is lost in the mists of antiquity. His
ancestral line was contemporaneous with that of De Ros, Howard, and
De La Zouche; but, owing to some trifling deficiency in the
possessions of the house of Loveday, the individual names and
intermarriages of its members were not recorded during the Middle
Ages, and thus their private lives in any given century were
uncertain. But it was known that the family had formed matrimonial
alliances with farmers not so very small, and once with a gentleman-
tanner, who had for many years purchased after their death the
horses of the most aristocratic persons in the county--fiery steeds
that earlier in their career had been valued at many hundred
guineas.

It was also ascertained that Mr. Loveday's great-grandparents had
been eight in number, and his great-great-grandparents sixteen,
every one of whom reached to years of discretion: at every stage
backwards his sires and gammers thus doubled and doubled till they
became a vast body of Gothic ladies and gentlemen of the rank known
as ceorls or villeins, full of importance to the country at large,
and ramifying throughout the unwritten history of England. His
immediate father had greatly improved the value of their residence
by building a new chimney, and setting up an additional pair of
millstones.

Overcombe Mill presented at one end the appearance of a hard-worked