pleasing conversation, which I shall often
recall, and always with lively satisfaction. May your slumbers be
refreshing and your awakening devoid of all pain! I wish you a very good
night, sir." With this Miss Aglonby took up one of the top-heavy
candlesticks, and glided, like the shade she was and ghost of a past
period, up the stairs.

While Mr. Gregory was looking to bolts and bars, Sir Robert strayed
about the room with his hands behind him, looking at the pictures,
followed by Mr. Aglonby, who made no extensive comment on them, but gave
a word of explanation occasionally when his guest halted longer than
usual before a canvas, such as, "The First Edmund, who came here in
1654;" "Edmund the Second;" "Edmund the Third, in his Oxford cap and
gown;" "Gregory Aglonby, a colonel in the Revolutionary forces;"
"Red-haired Edmund, as we call him, because the others are all dark;"
"Colonel Everard Buller Aglonby, who represented this county in the
House of Burgesses for thirty years, and his wife, who was a Calvert,--a
great-aunt, a woman of extraordinary piety, who reduced herself from a
condition of affluence to comparative poverty by the manumission of her
three hundred slaves."

When he had shaken hands with his host at the door of his bedroom (which
was emphatically the room of a bed, a huge, be-stepped, pillared,
testered contrivance that waited at one end of the large apartment to
murder sleep), Sir Robert fell to winding his watch with what looked
like interest, but all his thoughts were with the Aglonbys.

"English gentlefolks of the eighteenth century preserved in Virginian
amber. What a curious survival! 'Gentlemen of a period of manners,
morals.' Remarkably interesting! Delightful types of a society as
extinct as the dodo," he was saying to himself. "There is but one mould
for the gentleman; but nature changes its shape with every century, I
suppose,--though I sometimes think she has gone out of the business
altogether in utter disgust. We have got a lot of plutocrats that are
tailors' blocks, and nobles that talk like stable-boys and act like
blackguards, and both fancy themselves gentlemen; but when I contrast
them with the men of my father's day even--And this dainty, charming old
bit of Chelsea-ware, Anne Buller! Her brothers treat her as though she
were a reigning princess. I wonder what she would say if she could see,
as I did the other day, a group of Nuneham girls calling each other by
their last name