money, had bought outlying farms,--a bit of ground here and a bit
there,--talking, as he did so, much of political influence and of
the good old Tory cause. But these farms and bits of ground had gone
again before our time. To them had been attached no religion. When
old Kit had found himself pressed in that matter of the majority
of the Nineteenth Dragoons, in which crack regiment his second son
made for himself quite a career, he found it easier to sell than
to save--seeing that that which he sold was his own and not the
patrimony of the Dales. At his death the remainder of these purchases
had gone. Family arrangements required completion, and Christopher
Dale required ready money. The outlying farms flew away, as such
new purchases had flown before; but the old patrimony of the Dales
remained untouched, as it had ever remained.

It had been a religion among them; and seeing that the worship had
been carried on without fail, that the vestal fire had never gone
down upon the hearth, I should not have said that the Dales had
walked their ways without high principle. To this religion they had
all adhered, and the new heir had ever entered in upon his domain
without other encumbrances than those with which he himself was then
already burdened. And yet there had been no entail. The idea of an
entail was not in accordance with the peculiarities of the Dale mind.
It was necessary to the Dale religion that each squire should have
the power of wasting the acres of Allington,--and that he should
abstain from wasting them. I remember to have dined at a house, the
whole glory and fortune of which depended on the safety of a glass
goblet. We all know the story. If the luck of Edenhall should be
shattered, the doom of the family would be sealed. Nevertheless I was
bidden to drink out of the fatal glass, as were all guests in that
house. It would not have contented the chivalrous mind of the master
to protect his doom by lock and key and padded chest. And so it was
with the Dales of Allington. To them an entail would have been a
lock and key and a padded chest; but the old chivalry of their house
denied to them the use of such protection.

I have spoken something slightingly of the acquirements and doings
of the family; and indeed their acquirements had been few and their
doings little. At Allington, Dale of Allington had always been
known as a king. At Guestwick, the neighbouring market town, he was
a great man--to be seen freque