se were kept with care,
and produced to visitors with pride. Harry really did possess a wide fund
of solid, if quiet, knowledge. Presently, after reading a chapter or two,
he would drop off into a siesta, till some message came from the men or
the bailiff, asking for instructions.

The farmstead was, in fact, a mansion of large size, an old manor-house,
and had it been situate near a fashionable suburb and been placed in
repair would have been worth to let as much per annum as the rent of a
small farm. But it stood in a singularly lonely and outlying position, far
from any village of size, much less a town, and the very highway even was
so distant that you could only hear the horse's hoofs when the current of
air came from that direction. This was his aunt's--the housekeeper's--great
complaint, the distance to the highway. She grumbled because she could not
see the carriers' carts and the teams go by; she wanted to know what was
going on.

Harry, however, seemed contented with the placid calm of the vast house
that was practically empty, and rarely left it, except for his regular
weekly visit to market. After the fashion of a thoroughbred farmer he was
often rather late home on market nights. There were three brothers, all in
farms, and all well to do; the other two were married, and Harry was
finely plagued about being a bachelor. But the placid life at the old
place--he had succeeded to his father--somehow seemed to content him. He
had visitors at Christmas, he read his books of winter evenings and after
dinner; in autumn he strolled round with his double-barrel and knocked
over a hare or so, and so slumbered away the days. But he never neglected
the farming-everything was done almost exactly as it had been done by his
father.

Old Harry Hodson was in his time one of the characters of that country
side. He was the true founder of the Hodson family. They had been yeomen
in a small way for generations, farming little holdings, and working like
labourers, plodding on, and never heard of outside their fifty-acre farms.
So they might have continued till this day had not old Harry Hodson arose
to be the genius--the very Napoleon--of farming in that district. When the
present Harry, the younger, had a visitor to his taste--_i.e._ one who was
not in a hurry--he would, in the evening, pull out the books and papers
and letters of his late father from the bureau (beside which stood the
gun), and explain how the money was made.