felt that his Nemesis had overtaken him.
Lame as she had been, and swift as he had run, she had mouthed him at
last, and there was nothing left for him but to listen to the "whoop"
set up at the sight of his own death-throes.

It was a melancholy, dreary place now, that big house of Chaldicotes;
and though the woods were all green with their early leaves, and the
garden thick with flowers, they also were melancholy and dreary.
The lawns were untrimmed and weeds were growing through the gravel,
and here and there a cracked Dryad, tumbled from her pedestal and
sprawling in the grass, gave a look of disorder to the whole place.
The wooden trellis-work was shattered here and bending there, the
standard rose-trees were stooping to the ground, and the leaves of
the winter still encumbered the borders. Late in the evening of the
second day Mr. Sowerby strolled out, and went through the gardens
into the wood. Of all the inanimate things of the world this wood of
Chaldicotes was the dearest to him. He was not a man to whom his
companions gave much credit for feelings or thoughts akin to poetry,
but here, out in the Chace, his mind would be almost poetical. While
wandering among the forest trees, he became susceptible of the
tenderness of human nature: he would listen to the birds singing,
and pick here and there a wild flower on his path. He would watch
the decay of the old trees and the progress of the young, and make
pictures in his eyes of every turn in the wood. He would mark the
colour of a bit of road as it dipped into a dell, and then, passing
through a water-course, rose brown, rough, irregular, and beautiful
against the bank on the other side. And then he would sit and think
of his old family: how they had roamed there time out of mind in
those Chaldicotes woods, father and son and grandson in regular
succession, each giving them over, without blemish or decrease, to
his successor. So he would sit; and so he did sit even now, and,
thinking of these things, wished that he had never been born.

It was dark night when he returned to the house, and as he did so he
resolved that he would quit the place altogether, and give up the
battle as lost. The duke should take it and do as he pleased with
it; and as for the seat in Parliament, Lord Dumbello, or any other
equally gifted young patrician, might hold it for him. He would
vanish from the scene and betake himself to some land from whence he
would be neither heard nor seen