-the almost inevitable result of that
ever-present thorn in the flesh--that he shrunk as a poet, even as a
woman, while as a man, and a strong one, he reasoned and fought.

It fell out on this wise. He had attended the Quarter Sessions at
Westchurch; and a certain restlessness, born of the changing seasons,
being upon him, he had ridden. His habit, when passing outside the
limits of his own property, was to drive. He became aware--and angrily
conscious his groom was aware also--that his appearance afforded a
spectacle of the liveliest interest to the passers-by; that persons of
very various age and class had stopped and turned to gaze at him; and
that, while crossing the bridge spanning the dark, oily waters of the
canal, in the industrial quarter of the pushing, wide-awake, county
town, he had been the subject of brutal comment, followed by a hoarse
laugh from the collarless throats of some dozen operatives and bargees
loitering thereupon.

The consequence was that the young man arrived in court, his eyes
rather hard and his jaw set. Rich, well-born, not undistinguished too
for his attainments, and only three and twenty, Dickie had a fine fund
of arrogance to draw upon yet. He drew upon it this morning, rather to
the confusion of his colleagues upon the bench. Mr. Cathcart, the
chairman, was already present, and stood talking with Mr. Seymour, the
rector of Farley, a shrewd, able parson of the old sporting type.
Captain Fawkes of Water End was there too; and so was Lemuel Image,
eldest son of the Mr. Image, sometime mayor of Westchurch, who has been
mentioned in the early pages of this chronicle.

In the last twenty years, supported by ever-increasing piles of
barrels, the Image family had mounted triumphantly upward in the social
scale. Lemuel, the man in question, married a poor and distant relation
of Lord Aldborough, the late lord lieutenant of the county; and had by
this, and by a rather truculent profession of high Tory politics,
secured himself a seat on the bench. He had given a fancy price, too,
for that pretty, little place, Frodsmill, the grounds of which form
such an exasperating Naboth's vineyard in the heart of the Newland's
property. Neither his person, nor his politics, nor his absence of
culture, found favour in Richard Calmady's sight. And to-day, being
somewhat on edge, the brewer's large, blustering presence and
manner--at once patronising and servile--struck him as peculiarly
odious. Image betra