e, and wander a few yards from the
path, and he was almost sure to spring out over the hedge, and in angry
tones demand their name and address. The descendant of the chivalrous and
steelclad De Rockvilles was sunk into a restless spy on his own ample
property. There was but one idea in his mind--encroachment. It was
destitute of all other furniture but the musty technicalities of warrants
and commitments. There was a stealthy and skulking manner in everything
that he did. He went to church on Sundays, but it was no longer by the
grand iron gate opposite to his house, that stood generally with a large
spider's web woven over the lock, and several others in different corners
of the fine iron tracery, bearing evidence of the long period since it
had been opened. How different to the time when the Sir Roger and the
Lady of Rockville had had these gates thrown wide on a Sunday morning,
and with all their train of household servants after their back, with
true antique dignity, marched with much proud humility into the house of
God. Now, Sir Roger--the solitary, suspicious, undignified Sir Roger, the
keeper and policeman of his own property--stole in at a little side gate
from his paddock, and back the same way, wondering all the time whether
there was not somebody in his pheasant preserves, or Sunday trespassers
in his grove.

If you entered his house it gave you as cheerless a feeling as its owner.
There was the conservatory, so splendid with rich plants and flowers in
his mothers time--now a dusty receptacle of hampers, broken hand-glasses,
and garden tools. These tools could never be used, for the gardens were
grown wild. Tall grass grew in the walks, and the huge unpruned shrubs
disputed the passage with you. In the wood above the gardens, reached by
several flights of fine, but now moss-grown, steps, there stood a
pavilion, once clearly very beautiful. It was now damp and ruinous-its
walls covered with greenness and crawling insects. It was a great
lurking-place of Sir Roger when on the watch for poachers.

The line of the Rockvilles was evidently running fast out. It had reached
the extremity of imbecility and contempt--it must soon reach its close.

Sir Roger used to make his regular annual visit to town; but of late,
when there, he had wandered restlessly about the streets, peeping into
the shop-windows; and if it rained, standing under entries for hours
after, till it was gone over. The habit of lurking and peering