lushing a little, 'and they belonged to a race
that had never been used to pay much respect to parsons. To see that man
among the rest! He was thin and dignified; he looked to me as if he had
all the learning imaginable, and he had large, absent-looking eyes,
which, as George, the eldest brother, said, gave you the impression of
some one that "had lost somethin' when he was nobbut a lad, and had gone
seekin' it iver sence." He was formidable to me; but between us we
couldn't keep the rest of the party in order, so when the orgie had gone
on a certain time, we left it and went out into the air. It was an
August night. I remember Leyburn threw back his head and drank it in. "I
haven't breathed this air for five-and-twenty years," he said. "I
thought I hated the place, and in spite of that drunken crew in there,
it draws me to it like a magnet. I feel, after all, that I have the
fells in my blood." He was a curious man, a refined-looking melancholy
creature, with a face that reminded you of Wordsworth, and cold donnish
ways, except to his children and the poor. I always thought his life had
disappointed him somehow.'

'Yet one would think,' said Robert, opening his eyes, 'that he had made
a very considerable success of it!'

'Well, I don't know how it was,' said the vicar, whose analysis of
character never went very far. 'Anyhow, next day he went peering about
the place and the mountains and the lands his father had lost. And
George, the eldest brother, who had inherited the farm, watched him
without a word, in the way these Westmoreland folk have, and at last
offered him what remained of the place for a fancy price. I told him it
was a preposterous sum, but he wouldn't bargain. "I shall bring my wife
and children here in the holidays," he said, "and the money will set
George up in California." So he paid through the nose, and got
possession of the old house, in which, I should think, he had passed
about as miserable a childhood as it was possible to pass. There's no
accounting for tastes.'

'And then the next summer they all came down,' interrupted Mrs.
Thornburgh. She disliked a long story as she disliked being read aloud
to. 'Catherine was fifteen, not a bit like a child. You used to see her
everywhere with her father. To my mind he was always exciting her brain
too much, but he was a man you could not say a word to. I don't care
what William says about his being like Wordsworth; he just gave you the
blues to look at