quarrel. "And now, sir," he went on, "my apprenticeship is up, and I
am going on a long journey. Since you find my group pleasing I would
beg you to accept it, or--if you had liefer--to keep it for me until
I come again, as some day I shall." "I do not wonder," said I, "at
your wish to leave Lezardew Parish for the world where, as I augur,
great fortune awaits you." He smiled again at this and said that,
touching his future, he had neither any hope nor any fear: and again
he pressed me to accept the statuary. For a time I demurred, and in
the end made it a condition that he altered the faces somewhat,
concealing the likeness to John and Grace Magor: and to this he
consented. "Yet," said he, "it will be the truer likeness when the
time comes."

'He was gone on the morrow by daybreak, and late that afternoon the
farmer brought me the statuary in his hay-wagon. I had it set in the
garden by the great filberd-tree, and there it has stood for near
five-and-twenty years. (I ought to say that he had kept his promise
of altering the faces, and thereby to my thinking had defaced their
beauty: but beneath this defacement I still traced their first
likeness.)

'Now to speak of the originals. My way lying seldom by Goldsithney,
I saw little of John and Grace Magor during the next few years, and
nothing at all of them after they had left Goldsithney (their
fortunes not prospering) and rented a smaller farm on the coast
southward, below Rosudgeon: but what news came to me was ever of the
same tenour. Their marriage had brought neither children nor other
blessings. There were frequent quarrels, and the man had yielded to
drinking; the woman, too, it was reported. She, that had been so
trim a serving-maid, was become a slut with a foul tongue. They were
cruelly poor with it all; for money does not always stick to unclean
hands. I write all this to my reproach as well as to theirs, for
albeit they dwelt in another parish it had been my Christian duty to
seek them out. I did not, and I was greatly to blame.

'To pass over many years and come to the 2nd of December last (1718).
That night, about 11 o'clock, I sat in my library reading. It was
blowing hard without, the wind W.N.W.; but I had forgotten the gale
in my book, when a sound, as it were a distant outcry of many voices,
fetched me to unbar the shutters and open the window to listen.
The sound, whatever it was, had died away: I heard but the wind
roaring and th