ept the title after
it--_Armiger_--though the man himself had long departed to a life
with other distinctions. If the tablet were to be believed, he had
been a gentle squire too. The schoolmaster was wont to murmur the
list of his qualities over to himself:
_fortis_--_mitis_--_suavis_--_largus_--_urbanus_:--_desideratissimus_
too, and no marvel!--_nobili genere natus_--and _tam corpore quam
vultus praeclarus_!

It was a goodly list that the schoolmaster muttered over, and when
it was done he would add--"His very portrait, every line, every
word of it!" And then he would sigh.

Old as he was, the schoolmaster was not bearing testimony to the
truth of the inscription as regarded the man he referred to; that
Roger Beaufoy had gone back with all his virtues and his vices to
the Maker of Souls long before the schoolmaster could read what had
been written of him by the maker of epitaphs. It was to the
character of another Roger--the great-grandson of this squire--that
the old man adapted the graceful flattery of the epitaph. It fitted
in every fold, and yet he sighed. For in this Roger, as in that,
the sterner virtues were lacking. They had not even been supplied
upon the marble, though that is a charity not uncommonly granted
to the dead. But when the genial virtues abound, the world misses
the others so little!

[Here the sheet of paper is torn, but from the words on the part left
it is evident that there was a description of the frontispiece in the
schoolmaster's book. Apparently the subject of the picture was
allegorical, and the figures of "monstrous beasts" were interspersed
with "devices" and "scrolls with inscriptions," together with figures]

of kneeling saints, or pilgrims treading the Via Vitae with
sandalled shoes and heavy staves; and between the lips of dolorous
faces in penal fires issued the words _O AEternitas! AEternitas!_

All these things the schoolmaster duly interpreted, but the rest of
the story he made up out of his own head, a custom which had this
among other advantages, that the stories were not always the same,
which they must have been had the good man been a merely fluent
translator.

At the schoolmaster's elbow nestled his little granddaughter. By
herself she could not have secured so good a place, for she was
fragile and very