er
colours thickly, and Elsmere at once assumed extravagance.

'A saint, a beauty, and a wit all to yourselves in these wilds!' he
said, laughing. 'What luck! But what on earth brought them here--a widow
and three daughters--from the south? It was an odd settlement surely,
though you have one of the loveliest valleys and the purest airs in
England.'

'Oh, as to lovely valleys,' said Mrs. Thornburgh, sighing, 'I think it
very dull; I always have. When one has to depend for everything on a
carrier that gets drunk, too! Why, you know they belong here. They're
real Westmoreland people.'

'What does that mean exactly?'

'Oh, their grandfather was a farmer, just like one of the common
farmers about. Only his land was his own, and theirs isn't.'

'He was one of the last of the statesmen,' interposed Mr.
Thornburgh--who, having rescued his sermon from Jane's tender mercies,
and put out his modest claret and sherry for the evening, had strolled
out again and found himself impelled as usual to put some precision into
his wife's statements--'one of the small freeholders who have almost
disappeared here as elsewhere. The story of the Leyburns always seems to
me typical of many things.'

Robert looked inquiry, and the vicar, sitting down--having first picked
up his wife's ball of wool as a peace-offering, which was loftily
accepted--launched into a narrative which may be here somewhat
condensed.

The Leyburns' grandfather, it appeared, had been a typical north-country
peasant--honest, with strong passions both of love and hate, thinking
nothing of knocking down his wife with the poker, and frugal in all
things save drink. Drink, however, was ultimately his ruin, as it was
the ruin of most of the Cumberland statesmen. 'The people about here,'
said the vicar, 'say he drank away an acre a year. He had some fifty
acres, and it took about thirty years to beggar him.'

Meanwhile, this brutal, rollicking, strong-natured person had sons and
daughters--plenty of them. Most of them, even the daughters, were brutal
and rollicking too. Of one of the daughters, now dead, it was reported
that, having on one occasion discovered her father, then an old infirm
man, sitting calmly by the fire beside the prostrate form of his wife,
whom he had just felled with his crutch, she had taken off her wooden
shoe and given her father a clout on the head, which left his gray hair
streaming with blood; after which she had calmly put the horse into the