nsiderable relief was obtained by these and other measures. By
1852, there was a partial but perceptible improvement in the
position. The house was reopened in a very quiet way by
arrangement, and the allowance for Sir Stephen's expenditure was
rather more than doubled. But there was nothing like ease for him
until the purchase of the reversion was effected by me in 1865. I
paid L57,000 for the bulk of the property, subject to debts not
exceeding L150,000, and after the lives of the two brothers, the
table value of which was, I think, twenty-two and a-half years.
From this time your uncle had an income to spend of, I think,
L2200, or not more than half what he probably would have had since
1847 had the estate been sold, which it would only have been
through the grievous fault of others.

The full process of recovery was still incomplete, but the means of
carrying it forward were now comparatively simple. Since the
reversion came in, I have, as you know, forwarded that process; but
it has been retarded by agricultural depression and by the
disastrous condition through so many years of coal-mining; so that
there still remains a considerable work to be done before the end
can be attained, which I hope will never be lost sight of, namely,
that of extinguishing the debt upon the property, though for family
purposes the estate may still remain subject to charges in the way
of annuity.

The full history of the Hawarden estate from 1847 would run to a
volume. For some years after 1847, it and the Oak Farm supplied my
principal employment[204]; but I was amply repaid by the value of
it a little later on as a home, and by the unbroken domestic
happiness there enjoyed. What I think you will see, as clearly
resulting from this narrative, is the high obligation not only to
keep the estate in the family, and as I trust in its natural course
of descent, but to raise it to the best condition by thrift and
care, and to promote by all reasonable means the aim of diminishing
and finally extinguishing its debt.

This I found partly on a high estimate of the general duty to
promote the permanence of families having estates in land, but very
specially on the sacrifices made, through his remaining
twenty-seven years of life, by your uncle Stephen, without a