eton. An extremely amiable man, he took to wandering with his family,
and died in France, leaving one daughter--Frances, Stanley's mother--and
three sons, one of whom, absorbed in horses, wandered to Australia and
was killed by falling from them; one of whom, a soldier, wandered to
India, and the embraces of a snake; and one of whom wandered into the
embraces of the Holy Roman Church.

The Morton Plough Works were dry and dwindling when Stanley's father,
seeking an opening for his son, put him and money into them. From that
moment they had never looked back, and now brought Stanley, the sole
proprietor, an income of full fifteen thousand pounds a year. He wanted
it. For Clara, his wife, had that energy of aspiration which before now
has raised women to positions of importance in the counties which are not
their own, and caused, incidentally, many acres to go out of cultivation.
Not one plough was used on the whole of Becket, not even a Morton
plough--these indeed were unsuitable to English soil and were all sent
abroad. It was the corner-stone of his success that Stanley had
completely seen through the talked-of revival of English agriculture, and
sedulously cultivated the foreign market. This was why the Becket
dining-room could contain without straining itself large quantities of
local magnates and celebrities from London, all deploring the condition
of 'the Land,' and discussing without end the regrettable position of the
agricultural laborer. Except for literary men and painters, present in
small quantities to leaven the lump, Becket was, in fact, a rallying
point for the advanced spirits of Land Reform--one of those places where
they were sure of being well done at week-ends, and of congenial and even
stimulating talk about the undoubted need for doing something, and the
designs which were being entertained upon 'the Land' by either party.
This very heart of English country that the old Moretons in their
paternal way had so religiously farmed, making out of its lush grass and
waving corn a simple and by no means selfish or ungenerous subsistence,
was now entirely lawns, park, coverts, and private golf course, together
with enough grass to support the kine which yielded that continual stream
of milk necessary to Clara's entertainments and children, all female,
save little Francis, and still of tender years. Of gardeners, keepers,
cow-men, chauffeurs, footmen, stablemen--full twenty were supported on
those fift