uire's son was a
pretty young man at that time, and wider-minded than his father, having
no objection to little holdings; and he never took any proceedings
against her.'

There was now a lull in the discourse, and soon the van descended the
hill leading into the long straggling village. When the houses were
reached the passengers dropped off one by one, each at his or her own
door. Arrived at the inn, the returned emigrant secured a bed, and
having eaten a light meal, sallied forth upon the scene he had known so
well in his early days. Though flooded with the light of the rising
moon, none of the objects wore the attractiveness in this their real
presentation that had ever accompanied their images in the field of his
imagination when he was more than two thousand miles removed from them.
The peculiar charm attaching to an old village in an old country, as seen
by the eyes of an absolute foreigner, was lowered in his case by
magnified expectations from infantine memories. He walked on, looking at
this chimney and that old wall, till he came to the churchyard, which he
entered.

The head-stones, whitened by the moon, were easily decipherable; and now
for the first time Lackland began to feel himself amid the village
community that he had left behind him five-and-thirty years before. Here,
besides the Sallets, the Darths, the Pawles, the Privetts, the Sargents,
and others of whom he had just heard, were names he remembered even
better than those: the Jickses, and the Crosses, and the Knights, and the
Olds. Doubtless representatives of these families, or some of them, were
yet among the living; but to him they would all be as strangers. Far
from finding his heart ready-supplied with roots and tendrils here, he
perceived that in returning to this spot it would be incumbent upon him
to re-establish himself from the beginning, precisely as though he had
never known the place, nor it him. Time had not condescended to wait his
pleasure, nor local life his greeting.

The figure of Mr. Lackland was seen at the inn, and in the village
street, and in the fields and lanes about Upper Longpuddle, for a few
days after his arrival, and then, ghost-like, it silently disappeared. He
had told some of the villagers that his immediate purpose in coming had
been fulfilled by a sight of the place, and by conversation with its
inhabitants: but that his ulterior purpose--of coming to spend his latter
days among them--would probably n