Mr. Piper lives his life at Little Yafford Park, and spends unheard-of sums on the improvement of his farm buildings and hothouses. He has not married again, but has made for himself an idol in the shape of his farm. He goes on fattening cattle, and sacrificing generation after generation of pigs, in spite of the denunciations of Mr. Chumney, who continues to protest that so long as prize cattle are martyred at the shrine of human vanity the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals is a mockery. Poor Mr. Piper finds a consolation for past sorrows in the fatness of his oxen and his pigs. His sons and daughters have grown up. The sons are in different commercial houses, learning to be merchant princes; the daughters are established at the Park, in the rooms which Bella beautified. The chief result of an expensive education at present to be perceived in these young ladies is a self-sufficiency which makes them despise their father, whom they publicly reprove for his faulty modes of speech, and his many deviations from the strict laws of etiquette as laid down by the Misses Turk. He is proud of his two tall, over-dressed girls, nevertheless, though not so proud of them as of his pigs, and he endures their youthful insolence with unvarying good temper. As the years go on he gets stouter and more puffy, eats more, drinks more, sleeps more, and more markedly assimilates the manners and customs of his prize porkers; whereat Chumney shakes his head dolefully, and prognosticates that Piper will go off some day like the snuff of a candle. The school at Little Yafford has thriven under Emmanuel Joyce’s care, and the widow and her son still live happily in the cottage adjoining the school-house. Emmanuel is not solely dependent on his modest stipend as parish schoolmaster. He has been successful in his literary efforts. His books, all written for the young, have become immediately popular. His style is natural and pleasing, full of life and colour. That severe self-training he underwent in the days when he fancied himself a poet has stood him in good stead. His reading has taken a wider range, under the direction of Clement Dulcimer, and there is a richness of illustration in his later books that has a charm even for the unlearned. Mrs. Joyce’s pride in her son is boundless. She would like to see him married, but has not yet discovered that paragon of female excellence worthy to be his wife. While she is looking out for that personification of all the virtues, Emmanuel grows more and more wedded to his books, his chimney corner, his meerschaum pipe, and the duties of that station which Providence has allotted to him. Miss Coyle has departed this life, in the odour of sanctity, and her memory lives in the minds of Yafford people as a highly genteel person, who paid ready money for all her small requirements, was strict in her attendance at the services of her church, never carried a parcel, and was never seen out of doors without her gloves.