time that the Squire died; and not long afterwards, the
Squire's niece, a woman of great strength and simplicity of character,
married a clergyman to whom she had been long attached, both being
middle-aged people; and the living soon afterwards falling vacant, her
husband accepted it, and the newly-married pair moved into the Rectory;
while my friend, who had been named as the Squire's ultimate heir, a
life-interest in the property being secured to the niece, went into the
Hall. Shortly afterwards he adopted a nephew--his sister's son--who,
with the consent of all concerned, was brought up as the heir to the
estate, and is its present proprietor.

My friend lived some fifteen years after that, a quiet, active, and
obviously contented life. I was a frequent guest at the Hall, and I am
sure that I never saw a more attached circle. My friend became a
magistrate, and he did a good deal of county business; but his main
interest was in the place, where he was the trusted friend and
counsellor of every household in the parish. He took a great deal of
active exercise in the open air; he read much. He taught his nephew,
whom he did not send to school. He regained, in fuller measure than
ever, his old delightful charm of conversation, and his humour, which
had always been predominant in him, took on a deeper and a richer
tinge; but whereas in old days he had been brilliant and epigrammatic,
he was now rather poetical and suggestive; and whereas he had formerly
been reticent about his emotions and his religion, he now acquired what
is to my mind the profoundest conversational charm--the power of making
swift and natural transitions into matters of what, for want of a
better word, I will call spiritual experience. I remember his once
saying to me that he had learnt, from his intercourse with his village
neighbours, that the one thing in the world in which every one was
interested was religion; "even more," he added, with a smile, "than is
the one subject in which Sir Robert Walpole said that every one could
join."

I do not suppose that his religion was of a particularly orthodox kind;
he was impatient of dogmatic definition and of ecclesiastical
tendencies; but he cared with all his heart for the vital principles of
religion, the love of God and the love of one's neighbour.

He lived to see his adopted son grow up to maturity; and I do not think
I ever saw anything so beautiful as the confidence and affection that
subsisted be