It was kept up in the old style. Three of Leyburn's sons were
there: two of them farmers like himself, one a clerk, from Manchester,
a daughter married to a tradesman in Whinborough, a brother of the
old man, who was under the table before supper was half over, and
so on. Richard Leyburn wrote to ask me to come, and I went to
support his cloth. But I was new to the place,' said the vicar,
flushing a little, 'and they belonged to a race that had never been
used to pay much respect to parsons. To see that man among the
rest! He was thin and dignified; he looked to me as if he had all
the learning imaginable, and he had large, absent-looking eyes,
which, as George, the eldest brother, said, gave you the impression
of someone that "had lost somethin' when he was nobbut a lad, and
had gone seekin' it iver sence." He was formidable to me; but
between us we couldn't keep the rest of the party in order, so when
the orgie had gone on a certain time, we left it and went out into
the air. It was an August night. I remember Leyburn threw back
his head and drank it in. "I haven't breathed this air for
five-and-twenty years;" he said. "I thought I hated the place, and
in spite of that drunken crew in there, it draws me to it like a
magnet. I feel after all that I have the fells in my blood." He
was a curious man, a refined-looking melancholy creature, with a
face that reminded you of Wordsworth, and cold donnish ways, except
to his children and the poor. I always thought his life had
disappointed him somehow.'

'Yet one would think,' said Robert, opening his eyes, 'that he had
made a very considerable success of it!'

'Well, I don't know how it was,' said the vicar, whose analysis of
character never went very far. 'Anyhow, next day he went peering