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 to the father at last but to send him with many oaths to the
grammar school at Whinborough. From the moment the boy got a footing in
the school he hardly cost his father another penny. He got a local
bursary which paid his school expenses, he never missed a remove or
failed to gain a prize, and finally won a close scholarship which
carried him triumphantly to Queen's College.

His family watched his progress with a gaping, half-contemptuous
amazement, till he announced himself as safely installed at Oxford,
having borrowed from a Whinborough patron the modest sum necessary to
pay his college valuation--a sum which wild horses could not have
dragged out of his father, now sunk over head and ears in debt and
drink.

From that moment they practically lost sight of him. He sent the class
list which contained his name among the Firsts to his father; in the
same way he communicated the news of his Fellowship at Queen's, his
ordination and his appointment to the headmastership of a south-country
grammar school. None of his communications were ever answered till, in
the very last year of his father's life, the eldest son, who had a
shrewder eye all round to the main chance than the rest, applied to
'Dick' for cash wherewith to meet some of the family necessities. The
money was promptly sent, together with photographs of Dick's wife and
children. These last were not taken much notice of. These Leyburns were
a hard, limited, incurious set, and they no longer regarded Dick as one
of themselves.

'Then came the old man's death,' said Mr. Thornburgh. 'It happened the
year after I took the living. Richard Leyburn was sent for and came. I
never saw such a scene in my life as the funeral supper. 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, f