wealth. No great heiress had been married. There had been no ruin,--no
misfortune. But in the days of which we write the Squire of Carbury
Hall had become a poor man simply through the wealth of others. His
estate was supposed to bring him in £2,000 a year. Had he been content
to let the Manor House, to live abroad, and to have an agent at home
to deal with the tenants, he would undoubtedly have had enough to live
luxuriously. But he lived on his own land among his own people, as all
the Carburys before him had done, and was poor because he was
surrounded by rich neighbours. The Longestaffes of Caversham,--of which
family Dolly Longestaffe was the eldest son and hope,--had the name of
great wealth, but the founder of the family had been a Lord Mayor of
London and a chandler as lately as in the reign of Queen Anne. The
Hepworths, who could boast good blood enough on their own side, had
married into new money. The Primeros,--though the goodnature of the
country folk had accorded to the head of them the title of Squire
Primero,--had been trading Spaniards fifty years ago, and had bought
the Bundlesham property from a great duke. The estates of those three
gentlemen, with the domain of the Bishop of Elmham, lay all around the
Carbury property, and in regard to wealth enabled their owners
altogether to overshadow our squire. The superior wealth of a bishop
was nothing to him. He desired that bishops should be rich, and was
among those who thought that the country had been injured when the
territorial possessions of our prelates had been converted into
stipends by Act of Parliament. But the grandeur of the Longestaffes
and the too apparent wealth of the Primeros did oppress him, though he
was a man who would never breathe a word of such oppression into the
ear even of his dearest friend. It was his opinion,--which he did not
care to declare loudly, but which was fully understood to be his
opinion by those with whom he lived intimately,--that a man's standing
in the world should not depend at all upon his wealth. The Primeros