I took long walks
over the breezy moorland, and then in the evening after supper made
myself very much at home amid my uncle's books and the burnt sacrifice
of tobacco. I was not, however, very long in the house before I found
that my uncle was uncommonly preoccupied; something seemed to be
weighing upon his mind, for though he unbent at supper-time, and talked
by starts excellently over the port wine at dessert, he frequently fell
into an abstraction from which only with a mighty effort could he pluck
himself and resume his speech.

As I knew him to be engaged upon his family history I thought that his
gentle mind must be exercised upon some uncomfortable episode in the
life story of an ancestor, and I hit upon the notion that a certain Sir
Humphrey Startington--a notable merchant adventurer, who was said to
have largely increased the family estate by his traffic in slaves in the
seventeenth century--was the family skeleton that was haunting him. I
thought perhaps that my uncle's conscience was whispering in his ear
that he should make restitution, and as I knew that he was most eager to
find funds to rebuild and redecorate the chapel--now much dilapidated--I
assumed that a battle was being waged within his soul between these two
opposing claims.

Having arrived at this solution I led up to the subject of family
histories in general one evening over the supper-table when he was more
than usually inclined to talk and linger over our dessert.

'Families, I suppose, like nations, wax and wane,' I said, 'they become
atrophied, if not extinct.' The port was magnificent--of the year
'64--and I felt oracular. 'Hence the use of bastards. Robert the Devil
from the top of his tower falls in love with the laundrywoman bleaching
linen on the green, and in natural course William the Conqueror sees the
light of day.'

My uncle interrupted my eloquence.

'Far more often than people think the fall of a family, ay, or even of a
nation, is due to some crime or other which--unrepented and
unpurged--has festered in the body and brought corruption with it.

'I have deeply studied this profound problem, and I might tell you tales
of how son has never succeeded father, how gradually a house has sunk
into physical decay, and ended in abortion and an idiot.'

Falling into dejection he paused a moment, then with great emotion he
repeated the magnificent lines of Hector prophesying the fall of Priam,
and his house, and his great town of