onservative leaders. And those Babingtons
were such fools! He despised the whole race of them,--especially those
thick-legged, romping, cherry-cheeked damsels, of whom, no doubt, his
son would marry one. They were all of the earth earthy, without an idea
among them. And yet he did not dare to forbid his son to go to the
house, lest people should say of him that his sternness was unendurable.

Folking is not a place having many attractions of its own, beyond the
rats. It lies in the middle of the Cambridgeshire fens, between St.
Ives, Cambridge, and Ely. In the two parishes of Utterden and Netherden
there is no rise of ground which can by any stretch of complaisance be
called a hill. The property is bisected by an immense straight dike,
which is called the Middle Wash, and which is so sluggish, so straight,
so ugly, and so deep, as to impress the mind of a stranger with the
ideas of suicide. And there are straight roads and straight dikes, with
ugly names on all sides, and passages through the country called droves,
also with ugly appellations of their own, which certainly are not worthy
of the name of roads. The Folking Causeway possesses a bridge across the
Wash, and is said to be the remains of an old Roman Way which ran in a
perfectly direct line from St. Neots to Ely. When you have crossed the
bridge going northward,--or north-westward,--there is a lodge at your
right hand, and a private road running, as straight as a line can be
drawn, through pollard poplars, up to Mr. Caldigate's house. Round the
house there are meadows, and a large old-fashioned kitchen garden, and a
small dark flower-garden, with clipt hedges and straight walks, quite in
the old fashion. The house itself is dark, picturesque, well-built, low,
and uncomfortable. Part of it is as old as the time of Charles II., and
part dates from Queen Anne. Something was added at a later
date,--perhaps early in the Georges; but it was all done with good
materials, and no stint of labour. Shoddy had not been received among
building materials when any portion of Folking was erected. But then
neither had modern ideas of comfort become in vogue. Just behind the
kitchen-garden a great cross ditch, called Foul-water Drain, runs, or
rather creeps, down to the Wash, looking on that side as though it had
been made to act as a moat to the house; and on the other side of the
drain there is Twopenny Drove, at the end of which Twopenny Ferry leads
to Twopenny Hall, a farmhou