freeholders who have almost disappeared here as elsewhere. The
story of the Leyburns always seems to me typical of many things.'

Robert looked inquiry, and the vicar, sitting down--having first
picked up his wife's ball of wool as a peace-offering, which was
loftily accepted--launched into a narrative which way be here
somewhat condensed.

The Leyburns' grandfather, it appeared, had been a typical north-country
peasant--honest, with strong passions both of love and hate, thinking
nothing of knocking down his wife with the poker, and frugal in all
things save drink. Drink, however, was ultimately his ruin, as it
was the ruin of most of the Cumberland statesmen. 'The people about
here' said the vicar, 'say he drank away an acre a year. He had
some fifty acres, and it took about thirty years to beggar him.'

Meanwhile, this brutal, rollicking, strong-natured person had sons
and daughters--plenty of them. Most of them, even the daughters,
were brutal and rollicking too. Of one of the daughters, now dead,
it was reported that, having on one occasion discovered her father,
then an old infirm man, sitting calmly by the fire beside the
prostrate form of his wife whom he had just felled with his crutch,
she had taken off her wooden shoe and given her father a clout on
the head, which left his gray hair streaming with blood; after which
she had calmly put the horse into the cart, and driven off to fetch
the doctor to both her parents. But among this grim and earthy
crew, there was one exception, a 'hop out of kin,' of whom all the
rest made sport. This was the second son, Richard, who showed such
a persistent tendency to 'book-larnin', 'and such a persistent
idiocy in all matters pertaining to the land, that nothing was left