The fifth chapter was a triumph of literary and artistic handiwork. Even Mrs. Drake, who did not approve of the undertaking because she had to meet the expenses of publication, felt bound to admit that, if William had not chosen to become a great sea-captain, a certain other William, who had written plays for a living, might conceivably have been toppled from his eminence; for nothing could have been more thrilling than the story of a family vault, "filled with the bones and memories of the greatest centuries in British history," becoming first neglected, then forgotten, and finally overgrown by brambles and nettles: a vault, let the reader remember, not containing rude forefathers of the hamlet, but members of the family of Drake; a vault, not situated in the Ethiopian desert, nor abandoned within some Abyssinian jungle, but built beneath the turf of an English churchyard hard by a simple country Bethel. This vault became entirely lost! Summer followed spring, autumn preceded winter, year after year, while the nettles increased, and the brambles encroached yet more upon the consecrated ground, until the very site of the famous vault was lost to sight--this sentence being the one literary flaw upon an otherwise perfect chapter--and the oldest inhabitant had ceased to tell of its existence. Here the _History of the Parish of Highfield_ was interrupted by some chapters dealing with the birth, education, early struggles, voyages, adventures, success, and retirement of Captain Francis Drake; together with an account of Mrs. Drake and her relations; with a flattering notice of George Drake, Esquire, who was later to win renown as the explorer of Highfield churchyard and the discoverer of the long-missing vault. It was shown also how the Captain had been guided by Providence to the village, formerly the home of his ancestors, and how "the lure of the place had been nothing but the silver cord of an hereditary attraction stretched through the centuries to reach the golden bowl of his soul." Mrs. Drake objected to this sentence, and the printer made still stranger stuff of it; but George upheld his uncle's contention that poetical prose could not be out of place in a work dealing with the origin and progress of a wayside village. At this point the author interpolated, by means of footnotes, a few remarks, which he owned were unconnected with the purport of his work: Domesday Book alluded to Highfield in one deplorably curt sentence; the church contained nothing of interest; an oak tree, which had formerly shaded the village green, no longer existed; the views were local, charming, and full of variety; the streams contained fish; botanists would discover furze and heather upon the adjacent moorland; the name of the place was derived probably from two Anglo-Saxon words which signified a field standing in a high place.