en eighteen
years abroad. He wrote frequently to his steward, giving him minute and
thoughtful instructions in regard to the employment, comforts, and homes
of the peasantry, but peremptorily ordering him to spend no money on the
grounds and mansion, stating as a reason why the latter might be allowed
to fall into decay, his intention to pull it down whenever he returned
to England.

I stayed some time longer than my engagements well warranted at my
patient's house, not leaving till the sufferer, after a quiet sleep, had
removed from his bed to his armchair, taken food, and seemed perfectly
recovered from his attack.

Riding homeward, I mused on the difference that education makes, even
pathologically, between man and man. Here was a brawny inhabitant of
rural fields, leading the healthiest of lives, not conscious of the
faculty we call imagination, stricken down almost to Death's door by
his fright at an optical illusion, explicable, if examined, by the same
simple causes which had impressed me the night before with a moment's
belief in a sound and a spectre,--me who, thanks to sublime education,
went so quietly to sleep a few minutes after, convinced hat no phantom,
the ghostliest that ear ever heard or eye ever saw, can be anything else
but a nervous phenomenon.

CHAPTER XXII.

That evening I went to Mrs. Poyntz's; it was one of her ordinary
"reception nights," and I felt that she would naturally expect my
attendance as "a proper attention."

I joined a group engaged in general conversation, of which Mrs. Poyntz
herself made the centre, knitting as usual,--rapidly while she talked,
slowly when she listened.

Without mentioning the visit I had paid that morning, I turned the
conversation on the different country places in the neighbourhood, and
then incidentally asked, "What sort of a man is Sir Philip Derval? Is it
not strange that he should suffer so fine a place to fall into decay?"
The answers I received added little to the information I had already
obtained. Mrs. Poyntz knew nothing of Sir Philip Derval, except as a man
of large estates, whose rental had been greatly increased by a rise in
the value of property he possessed in the town of L----, and which lay
contiguous to that of her husband. Two or three of the older inhabitants
of the Hill had remembered Sir Philip in his early days, when he was
gay, high-spirited, hospitable, lavish. One observed that the only
person in L---- whom he had admitte