The dawning of the new Poor-Law led to investigations which revealed the true conditions of the peasant’s life—its destitution, recklessness, and dependence. We tried to mend matters by inducing families to emigrate, but this renewed the distrust which had at first beheld in the schools an attempt to enslave the children. Even accounts, sent home by the exceptionally enterprising who did go to Canada, were, we found, scarcely trusted. Amos Bell, who would have gone, if he had not been growing into my special personal attendant, was letter-writer and reader to all his relations, and revealed to us that it had been agreed that no letter should be considered as genuine unless it bore a certain private mark. To be sure, the accounts of prosperity might well sound fabulous to the toilers and moilers at home. Harriet Martineau’s _Hamlets_, which we lent to many of our neighbours, is a fair picture of the state of things. We much enjoyed those tales, and Emily says they were the only political economy she ever learnt. The model arrangements of our vestries led to a summons to my father and the younger Mr. Fordyce to London, to be examined on the condition of the pauper, and the working of the old Elizabethan Poor-Law. They were absent for about a fortnight of early spring, and Emily and I could not help observing that our mother was unusually uncommunicative about my father’s letters; and, moreover, there was a tremendous revolution of the furniture, a far more ominous token in our household than any comet. The truth came on us when the two fathers returned. Mine told me himself that Frank Fordyce was so much displeased with Griffith’s conduct that he had declared that the engagement could not continue with his consent. This from good-natured, tender-hearted Parson Frank! I cried out hotly that ‘those Lesters’ had done this. They had always been set against us, and any one could talk over Mr. Frank. My father shook his head. He said Frank Fordyce was not weak, but all the stronger for his gentleness and charity; and, moreover, that he was quite right—to our shame and grief be it spoken—quite right. It was true that the first information had been given by Sir Horace Lester, Mrs. Fordyce’s brother, but it had not been lightly spoken like the daughter’s chatter; and my father himself had found it only too true, so that he could not conscientiously call Griffith worthy of such a creature as Ellen Fordyce.