heard, and we stopped to listen. Was it a fire? No, the ringing was not
vehement enough. A meeting of the church? In a moment we should know. As
the bell ceased, we looked up to the white taper spire to catch the next
sound. One stroke. It was a death, then,--and of a man. We listened for
the age tolled from the belfry. Fifty-five. Who had departed? The sexton
crossed the green on his way to the shop to make the coffin, and informed
us. Our bats and balls had lost their interest for us; we did not even ask
our tally-man, who cut notches for us on a stick, how the game stood. For
Squire Walter Kinloch was the most considerable man in our village of
Innisfield. Without being highly educated, he was a man of reading and
intelligence. In early life he had amassed a fortune in the China trade,
and with it he had brought back a deeply bronzed complexion, a scar from
the creese of a Malay pirate, and the easy manners which travel always
gives to observant and sensible men. But his rather stately carriage
produced no envy or ill-will among his humbler neighbors, for his
superiority was never questioned. Men bowed to him with honest good-will,
and boys, who had been flogged at school for confounding Congo and
Coromandel, and putting Borneo in the Bight of Benin, made an awkward
obeisance and stared wonderingly, as they met the man who had actually
sailed round the world, and had, in his own person, illustrated the
experiment of walking with his head downwards among the antipodes. His
house had no rival in the country round, and his garden was considered a
miracle of art, having, in popular belief, all the fruits, flowers, and
shrubs that had been known from the days of Solomon to those of Linnaeus.
Prodigious stories were told of his hoard of gold, and some of the less
enlightened thought that even the outlandish ornaments of the balustrade
over the portico were carven silver. Curious vases adorned the hall and
side-board; and numberless quaint trinkets, whose use the villagers could
not even imagine, gave to the richly-furnished rooms an air of Oriental
magnificence. Tropical birds sang or chattered in cages, and a learned but
lawless parrot talked, swore, or made mischief, as he chose. The tawny
servant George, brought by Mr. Kinloch from one of the islands of the
Pacific, completed his claims upon the admiration of the untravelled.

He was just ready to enjoy the evening of life, when the night of death
closed upon him with t