ials. There they were, in dedicated corners.
'Edmund and his wife Catherine'--'Charles Edmund and his wife
Florence'--'Maurice Edmund and his wife Dorothy.' Clara had set her foot
down against 'Stanley and his wife Clara' being in the fourth; her soul
was above ploughs, and she, of course, intended to be buried at Becket,
as Clara, dowager Lady Freeland, for her efforts in regard to the land.
Felix, who had a tendency to note how things affected other people,
watched Derek's inspection of these memorials and marked that they
excited in him no tendency to ribaldry. The boy, indeed, could hardly be
expected to see in them what Felix saw--an epitome of the great, perhaps
fatal, change that had befallen his native country; a record of the
beginning of that far-back fever, whose course ran ever faster, which had
emptied country into town and slowly, surely, changed the whole spirit of
life. When Edmund Moreton, about 1780, took the infection disseminated
by the development of machinery, and left the farming of his acres to
make money, that thing was done which they were all now talking about
trying to undo, with their cries of: "Back to the land! Back to peace
and sanity in the shade of the elms! Back to the simple and patriarchal
state of feeling which old documents disclose. Back to a time before
these little squashed heads and bodies and features jutted every which
way; before there were long squashed streets of gray houses; long
squashed chimneys emitting smoke-blight; long squashed rows of graves;
and long squashed columns of the daily papers. Back to well-fed
countrymen who could not read, with Common rights, and a kindly feeling
for old 'Moretons,' who had a kindly feeling for them!" Back to all
that? A dream! Sirs! A dream! There was nothing for it now, but
--progress! Progress! On with the dance! Let engines rip, and the
little, squash-headed fellows with them! Commerce, literature, religion,
science, politics, all taking a hand; what a glorious chance had money,
ugliness, and ill will! Such were the reflections of Felix before the
brass tablet:

"IN LOVING MEMORY OF
EDMUND MORTON
AND
HIS DEVOTED WIFE
CATHERINE.

AT REST IN THE LORD. A.D., 1816."

From the church they went about their proper business, to interview a Mr.
Pogram, of the firm of Pogram & Collet, solicitors, in whose h