e on a certain time, we left it and went out into the air. It was an
August night. I remember Leyburn threw back his head and drank it in.
"I haven't breathed this air for five-and-twenty years;" he said. "I
thought I hated the place, and in spite of that drunken crew in there,
it draws me to it like a magnet. I feel after all that I have the
fells in my blood." He was a curious man, a refined-looking melancholy
creature, with a face that reminded you of Wordsworth, and cold donnish
ways, except to his children and the poor. I always thought his life had
disappointed him somehow.'

'Yet one would think,' said Robert, opening his eyes, 'that he had made
a very considerable success of it!'

'Well, I don't know how it was,' said the vicar, whose analysis of
character never went very far. 'Anyhow, next day he went peering about
the place and the mountains and the lands his father had lost. And
George, the eldest brother, who had inherited the farm, watched him
without a word, in the way these Westmoreland folk have, and at last
offered him what remained of the place for a fancy price. I told him it
was a preposterous sum, but he wouldn't bargain. "I shall bring my wife
and children here in the holidays," he said, "and the money will
set George up in California." So he paid through the nose, and got
possession of the old house, in which I should think he had passed
about as miserable a childhood as it was possible to pass. There's no
accounting for tastes.'

'And then the next summer they all came down,' interrupted Mrs.
Thornburgh. She disliked a long story as she disliked being read aloud
to. 'Catherine was fifteen, not a bit like a child. You used to see her
everywhere with her father. To my mind he was always exciting her brain
too much, but he was a man you could not say a word to. I don't care
what William says about his being like Wordsworth; he just gave you the
blues to look at.'

'It was so strange,' said the vicar meditatively, 'to see them in that
house. If you knew the things that used to go on there in old days--the
savages that lived there. And then to see those three delicately
brought-up children going in and out of the parlor where old Leyburn
used to sit smoking and drinking; and Dick Leyburn walking about in a
white tie, and the same men touching their hats to him who had belabored
him when he was a boy at the village school--it was queer.'

'A curious little bit of social history,' said Elsmere. 'We