Although Squire Cortelyon courted and loved a cheap popularity, at heart he was a man of a hard and griping disposition, whose chief object in life, more especially of late years, had been the accumulation of wealth in the shape of landed property. Even in early life he had never either hunted or shot, but, for all that, he subscribed liberally to the nearest pack of hounds, as also--but less liberally--to the usual local charities. Although he employed a couple of keepers, he did not preserve too strictly, a fact which tended to his popularity among his poorer neighbors, while having an opposite effect among those of his own standing in the county. In point of fact, three-fourths of the game on his estates was shot by his keepers and sent, under his direction, for sale to the nearest large town. When Ambrose Cortelyon, at the age of thirty-five, came into his patrimony, it was not only grievously burdened with debt, but, as far as mere acreage was concerned, owing to extravagant living on the part of his two immediate progenitors, had dwindled to little more than a third of what it had been sixty years before. From the first the new Squire made up his mind that the follies of his father and grandfather should not be repeated in his case. From the first he set two objects definitely before him, and never allowed himself to lose sight of them. Object number one was to wipe off the burden of debt he had inherited from his father. This, by the practice of rigid economy, he was enabled to do in the course of eight or ten years, after which he began to save. Object number two was to become, in the course of time, a large landowner, even as his great-grandfather and his more remote ancestors right away back to the sixteenth century had been. Thus, in the course of time it came to pass that Ambrose Cortelyon had become the owner of sundry considerable properties (not all of them situated in his own county, but none of them farther off than a day's ride) which, owing to one cause or another, had come into the market. Every season--and what was true then seems equally true to-day--brought its own little crop of landed proprietors who, owing to improvidence or misfortune or both, had fallen upon evil days, and whenever there was a likely property in the neighborhood to be had a bargain, the Squire, or his agent Mr. Piljoy, was always to the fore. With the former it was an article of faith that, for one reason or other, landed property would rise greatly in value in the course of the next generation or two, and so constitute a stable inheritance for those to come after him. In so believing the prescience with which he credited himself was undoubtedly at fault. Many things were to happen during the next half-century of which not even the most far-seeing of the statesmen of those days had the slightest prevision.