Certain of the old man’s habits would have jarred upon a man and woman of less regular habits, or possessed of less self-control than were Mr Burden and his wife. Thus he had taken, of a sudden, a considerable interest in gardening, a matter upon which neither of the young people felt any great concern; he became weather-wise, and he was forever fetching in an artizan whom he patronised, to rearrange those bells and hinges, wherewith his son and his daughter-in-law were already perfectly contented. A more serious difficulty was the attachment which Mr Burden, senior, unexpectedly conceived for the policy of Mr Disraeli; whereas young Mr Burden could not disguise his loyalty to Mr Gladstone, a sentiment in which his wife supported him with a zeal only tempered by her repeated references to the Irish Church. Indeed, when Mr Gladstone’s windows in Harley Street were broken by a mob, nothing but Mr Burden’s filial piety restrained him from rebuking the excessive glee of his now aged father; and when Mr Disraeli was promoted to the peerage and offered a golden wreath by a co-religionist, Mr Burden went so far as to take Mrs Burden to the seaside for a week, until the storm should have blown over. It would be unjust to insist upon these trivial inconveniences. The respect due to his father’s years was soon enhanced by Mr Burden’s anxiety for his health. In the January of 1880, Mrs Burden having by that time given birth to three children (their grandfather’s delight and pride), her husband, who had long become the sole head of the great business in Thames Street, had the pain of seeing the old man take to his bed, whereon, some eight months later, he very peacefully expired. It needs but little space to follow the existence led by Mr Burden after this revolution in his fortunes; for it is the purpose of these few pages rather to record the impression of his own much more recent demise, and to leave some record of his character, than to follow at any length the history of his life. [Illustration: MRS BURDEN AT THE AGE OF FORTY-THREE FROM A MINIATURE] The three children, Ermyntrude, Cosmo, and Gwynnys, were trained in those excellent traditions which the family had inherited for now three generations of decent affluence; but Mr Burden and his wife justly considered that the steady increase of their fortunes (which they naturally ascribed to their considerable capacity, but which were perhaps, more due to the evolution of modern industry) permitted them to entertain some legitimate ambitions for the future of their offspring.