try and
blameless conversation, gave him, to his great joy and astonishment,
the living of Drumston, worth 350L. a-year. And now, at last, he might
marry if he would. True, the morning of his life was gone long since,
and its hot noon spent in thankless labour; but the evening, the sober,
quiet evening, yet remained, and he and Jane might still render
pleasant for one another the downward road toward the churchyard, and
hand-in-hand walk more tranquilly forward to meet that dark tyrant
Death, who seemed so terrible to the solitary watcher.

A month or less after John was installed, one soft grey day in March,
this patient couple walked slowly arm-in-arm up the hill, under the
lychgate, past the dark yew that shadowed the peaceful graves, and so
through the damp church porch, up to the old stone altar, and there
were quietly married, and then walked home again. No feasting or
rejoicing was there at that wedding; the very realization of their long
deferred hopes was a disappointment. In March they were married, and
before the lanes grew bright with the primroses of another spring, poor
Jane was lying in a new-made grave, in the shadow of the old grey tower.

But, though dead, she yet lived to him in the person of a bright-eyed
baby, a little girl, born but three months before her mother's death.
Who can tell how John watched and prayed over that infant, or how he
felt that there was something left for him in this world yet, and
thought that if his child would live, he should not go down to the
grave a lonely desolate man. Poor John!--who can say whether it would
not have been better if the mother's coffin had been made a little
larger, and the baby had been carried up the hill, to sleep quietly
with its mother, safe from all the evil of this world.

But the child lived and grew, and, at seventeen, I remember her well, a
beautiful girl, merry, impetuous, and thoughtless, with black waving
hair and dark blue eyes, and all the village loved her and took pride
in her. For they said--"She is the handsomest and the best in the
parish."

Chapter III

THE HISTORY OF (A CERTAIN FAMILY LIVING IN) EUROPE, FROM THE BATTLE OF
TRAFALGAR TO THE PEACE OF 1818, CONTAINING FACTS HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED.

Among all the great old commoner families of the south of England, who
have held the lands of their fore-fathers through every change of
dynasty and religion, the Buckleys of Clere stand deservedly high among
the brightest and