ortrait of him from his father the doctor. It was often
the occasion of the story being told over again, and used to hang in the
patients' reception room, next to an oil-painting of the Punch-Bowl, an
admired landscape picture by a local artist, highly-toned and true
to every particular of the scene, with the bright yellow road winding
uphill, and the banks of brilliant purple heath, and a white thorn in
bloom quite beautiful, and the green fir trees, and the big Bowl black
as a cauldron,--indeed a perfect feast of harmonious contrasts in
colours.

And now you know how it is that the names of Captain Kirby and Curtis
Fakenham are alive to the present moment in the district.

We lived a happy domestic life in those old coaching days, when county
affairs and county people were the topics of firesides, and the country
enclosed us to make us feel snug in our own importance. My opinion is,
that men and women grow to their dimensions only where such is the case.
We had our alarms from the outside now and again, but we soon relapsed
to dwell upon our private business and our pleasant little hopes and
excitements; the courtships and the crosses and the scandals, the
tea-parties and the dances, and how the morning looked after the stormy
night had passed, and the coach coming down the hill with a box of news
and perhaps a curious passenger to drop at the inn. I do believe we
had a liking for the very highwaymen, if they had any reputation for
civility. What I call human events, things concerning you and me,
instead of the deafening catastrophes now afflicting and taking all
conversation out of us, had their natural interest then. We studied the
face of each morning as it came, and speculated upon the secret of
the thing it might have in store for us or our heroes and heroines; we
thought of them more than of ourselves. Long after the adventures of
the Punch-Bowl, our county was anxious about Countess Fanny and the Old
Buccaneer, wondering where they were and whether they were prospering,
whether they were just as much in love as ever, and which of them would
bury the other, and what the foreign people abroad thought of that
strange pair.

CHAPTER III. CONTINUATION OF THE INTRODUCTORY MEANDERINGS OF DAME
GOSSIP, TOGETHER WITH HER SUDDEN EXTINCTION

I have still time before me, according to the terms of my agreement with
the person to whom I have, I fear foolishly, entrusted the letters
and documents of a story surpassin