SIR KENRICK’S ANCESTRAL HOME. SIR KENRICK CULVERHOUSE had gone to Hampshire to look at the old domain. He had plenty of friends in the neighbourhood of Culverhouse, who would have been glad to give him hospitality, but he preferred the less luxurious accommodation of his own house, which was maintained by a couple of faithful old servants, very much in the style of the Master of Ravenswood’s immortal _ménage_ at Wolf’s Craig. The old butler was not so amusing or so enthusiastic as Caleb Balderstone; but he was every whit as faithful, and preferred his board wages and bacon dumplings, in the halls of the good old race, to those fleshpots of Egypt which he might perchance have found in the service of some mushroom gentleman or commercial magnate newly established in the neighbourhood. People had told Kenrick that he ought to let Culverhouse Castle, and that he might add considerably to his income by so doing. But Kenrick repudiated the idea of an income so obtained. To allow purse-proud city people to come and criticise those old familiar rooms, and make rude remarks upon the shabbiness of the furniture--to have some newly-made country squire, whose beginnings were on the Stock Exchange, airing his unaccustomed grandeur in the rooms where meek Lady Culverhouse had lived her tranquil unoffending life--no; Kenrick would have starved rather than sanction such a desecration. His mother’s gentle shadow still occupied the rooms she had loved. He would not have that peaceful ghost scared away by horsey young ladies or billiard-playing young men. At a cost of about a hundred and fifty pounds a year--nearly half his small income--Kenrick contrived to have the place kept decently; the gardens free from weeds and ruin; the empty stables protected from wind and rain; the house preserved from actual decay. And the place was ready to receive him when he was able to come home, were it but for a single night. This, in Kenrick’s mind, was much.