about the place and the mountains and the lands his father had lost.
And George, the eldest brother, who had inherited the farm, watched
him without a word, in the way these Westmoreland folk have, and
at last offered him what remained of the place for a fancy price.
I told him it was a preposterous sum, but he wouldn't bargain.
"I shall bring my wife and children here in the holidays," he said,
"and the money will set George up in California." So he paid through
the nose, and got possession of the old house, in which I should
think he had passed about as miserable a childhood as it was possible
to pass. There's no accounting for tastes.'

'And then the next summer they all came down,' interrupted Mrs.
Thornburgh. She disliked a long story as she disliked being read
aloud to. 'Catherine was fifteen, not a bit like a child. You
used to see her everywhere with her father. To my mind he was always
exciting her brain too much, but he was a man you could not say a
word to. I don't care what William says about his being like
Wordsworth; he just gave you the blues to look at.'

'It was so strange,' said the vicar meditatively, 'to see them in
that house. If you knew the things that used to go on there in old
days--the savages that lived there. And then to see those three
delicately brought-up children going in and out of the parlor where
old Leyburn used to sit smoking and drinking; and Dick Leyburn
walking about in a white tie, and the same men touching their hats
to him who had belabored him when he was a boy at the village
school--it was queer.'

'A curious little bit of social history,' said Elsmere. 'Well, and
then he died and the family lived on?'