she had been long attached, both being middle-aged people; and the
living soon afterwards falling vacant, her husband accepted it, and
the newly-married pair moved into the Rectory; while my friend, who
had been named as the Squire's ultimate heir, a life-interest in
the property being secured to the niece, went into the Hall.
Shortly afterwards he adopted a nephew--his sister's son--who, with
the consent of all concerned, was brought up as the heir to the
estate, and is its present proprietor.

My friend lived some fifteen years after that, a quiet, active, and
obviously contented life. I was a frequent guest at the Hall, and I
am sure that I never saw a more attached circle. My friend became a
magistrate, and he did a good deal of county business; but his main
interest was in the place, where he was the trusted friend and
counsellor of every household in the parish. He took a great deal
of active exercise in the open air; he read much. He taught his
nephew, whom he did not send to school. He regained, in fuller
measure than ever, his old delightful charm of conversation, and
his humour, which had always been predominant in him, took on a
deeper and a richer tinge; but whereas in old days he had been
brilliant and epigrammatic, he was now rather poetical and
suggestive; and whereas he had formerly been reticent about his
emotions and his religion, he now acquired what is to my mind the
profoundest conversational charm--the power of making swift and
natural transitions into matters of what, for want of a better
word, I will call spiritual experience. I remember his once saying
to me that he had learnt, from his intercourse with his village
neighbours, that the one thing in the world in which every one was
interested was religion; "even more," he added, with a smile, "than
is the one subject in which Sir Robert Walpole said that every one