e were
almost the last words of the stern, thrifty, old Puritan craftsman,
and his son never forgot them. From a mill-owner he grew to coal-
owner, shipowner, banker, railway director, money-lender to kings
and princes; and last of all, as the summit of his own and his
compeer's ambition, to land-owner. He had half a dozen estates in
as many different counties. He had added house to house, and field
to field; and at last bought Minchampstead Park and ten thousand
acres, for two-thirds its real value, from that enthusiastic
sportsman Lord Peu de Cervelle, whose family had come in with the
Conqueror, and gone out with George IV. So, at least, they always
said; but it was remarkable that their name could never be traced
farther back than the dissolution of the monasteries: and
Calumnious Dryasdusts would sometimes insolently father their title
on James I. and one of his batches of bought peerages. But let the
dead bury their dead. There was now a new lord in Minchampstead;
and every country Caliban was finding, to his disgust, that he had
'got a new master,' and must perforce 'be a new man.' Oh! how the
squires swore and the farmers chuckled, when the 'Parvenu' sold the
Minchampstead hounds, and celebrated his 1st of September by
exterminating every hare and pheasant on the estate! How the
farmers swore and the labourers chuckled when he took all the
cottages into his own hands and rebuilt them, set up a first-rate
industrial school, gave every man a pig and a garden, and broke up
all the commons 'to thin the labour-market.' Oh, how the labourers
swore and the farmers chuckled, when he put up steam-engines on all
his farms, refused to give away a farthing in alms, and enforced the
new Poor-law to the very letter. How the country tradesmen swore,
when he called them 'a pack of dilatory jobbers,' and announced his
intention of employing only London workmen for his improvements.
Oh! how they all swore together (behind his back, of course, for his
dinners were worth eating), and the very ladies said naughty words,
when the stern political economist proclaimed at his own table that
'he had bought Minchampstead for merely commercial purposes, as a
profitable investment of capital, and he would see that, whatever
else it did, it should PAY.'

But the new lord heard of all the hard words with a quiet self-
possessed smile. He had formed his narrow theory of the universe,
and he was