country," and assuming
the character of a loyal subject of the good Queen of England.

CHAPTER XXX.

WHICH GIVES THE HISTORY OF AN ANNIVERSARY, PRESENTS A TABLEAU, AND DROPS
THE CURTAIN.

Three months after Mr. Belcher's escape, the great world hardly
remembered that such a man as he had ever lived. Other rascals took his
place, and absorbed the public attention, having failed to learn--what
even their betters were slow to apprehend--that every strong, active,
bad man is systematically engaged in creating and shaping the
instruments for his own destruction. Men continued to be dazzled by
their own success, until they could see neither the truth and right that
lay along their way, nor the tragic end that awaited them.

The execution in satisfaction of the judgment obtained against Mr.
Belcher was promptly issued and levied; claimants and creditors of
various sorts took all that the execution left; Mrs. Belcher and her
children went to their friends in the country; the Sevenoaks property
was bought for Mr. Benedict, and a thousand lives were adjusted to the
new circumstances; but narrative palls when its details are anticipated.
Let us pass them, regarding them simply as memories coming up--sometimes
faintly, sometimes freshly--from the swiftly retiring years, and close
the book, as we began it, with a picture.

Sevenoaks looks, in its main features, as it looked when the reader
first saw it. The river rolls through it with the old song that the
dwellers upon its banks have heard through all these changing years. The
workmen and workwomen come and go in the mill, in their daily round of
duty, as they did when Phipps, and the gray trotters, and the great
proprietor were daily visions of the streets. The little tailoress
returns twice a year with her thrifty husband, to revisit her old
friends; and she brings at last a little one, which she shows with great
pride. Sevenoaks has become a summer thoroughfare to the woods, where
Jim receives the city-folk in incredible numbers.

We look in upon the village on a certain summer evening, at five years'
remove from the first occupation of the Belcher mansion by Mr. Benedict.
The mist above the falls cools the air and bathes the trees as it did
when Robert Belcher looked upon it as the incense which rose to his
lordly enterprise. The nestling cottages, the busy shops, the
fresh-looking spires, the distant woods, the more distant mountain, the
old Seven Oaks upon the