ntly on Saturdays, standing in the
market-place, and laying down the law as to barley and oxen among
men who knew usually more about barley and oxen than did he. At
Hamersham, the assize town, he was generally in some repute, being
a constant grand juror for the county, and a man who paid his way.
But even at Hamersham the glory of the Dales had, at most periods,
begun to pale, for they had seldom been widely conspicuous in the
county, and had earned no great reputation by their knowledge of
jurisprudence in the grand jury room. Beyond Hamersham their fame
had not spread itself.

They had been men generally built in the same mould, inheriting each
from his father the same virtues and the same vices,--men who would
have lived, each, as his father had lived before him, had not the new
ways of the world gradually drawn away with them, by an invisible
magnetism, the upcoming Dale of the day,--not indeed in any case so
moving him as to bring him up to the spirit of the age in which he
lived, but dragging him forward to a line in advance of that on
which his father had trodden. They had been obstinate men; believing
much in themselves; just according to their ideas of justice; hard
to their tenants but not known to be hard even by the tenants
themselves, for the rules followed had ever been the rules on
the Allington estate; imperious to their wives and children, but
imperious within bounds, so that no Mrs Dale had fled from her lord's
roof, and no loud scandals had existed between father and sons;
exacting in their ideas as to money, expecting that they were to
receive much and to give little, and yet not thought to be mean,
for they paid their way, and gave money in parish charity and in
county charity. They had ever been steady supporters of the Church,
graciously receiving into their parish such new vicars as, from time
to time, were sent to them from King's College, Cambridge, to which
establishment the gift of the living belonged,--but, nevertheless,
the Dales had ever carried on some unpronounced warfare against the
clergyman, so that the intercourse between the lay family and the
clerical had seldom been in all respects pleasant.

Such had been the Dales of Allington, time out of mind, and such in
all respects would have been the Christopher Dale of our time, had he
not suffered two accidents in his youth. He had fallen in love with
a lady who obstinately refused his hand, and on her account he had
remained single;