with him. But he was alive to the duties as well as to the rights of landownership. It was his boast that he knew the names and histories and had set foot in the farmhouses or cottages of all the tenants on his estate. One touch of feudal or patriarchal distinction he jealously retained. He was fond of arriving just a minute late on Sunday morning at the village church, in the hope that the rector, out of deference to his rank and dignity, would allow him a little grace and would not begin the prayers until he had taken his seat, after burying his face for two or three seconds in his tall hat and then depositing it on the cushion, when he would give a sort of nod to the reading-desk, as much as to say, ‘I am ready now.’ The long avenue of chestnuts stretches from the Hall to the Park gates, and the church is just outside them across the road, so that the sexton, who was set to keep watch, could see ‘my lord’s party’ coming churchwards and could give the signal for the rector to leave the vestry. Lord Venniker never failed--not even in the worst weather--to occupy his seat at the morning service in the square, tall family pew with its red baize cushions and hassocks, and the little grate in which his lordship, if the sermon were too long, would somewhat ostentatiously poke the fire, and the hatchments of the Venniker family looking down from the walls above it. He was a good and worthy man, Lord Venniker, but he believed in the world as it was, with a noble Venniker always supreme at Helmsbury Hall. He hated what he called ‘ideas,’ though it would seem that the opinions of the lord of Helmsbury were not ‘ideas.’ He belonged politically to the country party, and all Helmsbury, including its voters, belonged to him. There were three epithets which he was in the habit of hurling at such persons as were the objects of his animosity or aversion, and it was believed that the epithets represented ascending degrees of iniquity; but he did not always use them with a nice discrimination. If a person of different political or economical views gave him offence (as was generally the case if they came into contact with him at all), he would probably call him an ‘agitator.’ If the offence was aggravated, he would call him a ‘Chartist’; for he remembered the days of blazing hayricks and farm-buildings, and it was his conviction that a ‘strong hand’ was needed to crush the early symptoms of revolution. But there was a worst epithet of all not often employed, but reserved for such outrageous persons as presumed to dispute the natural right of the lords of Helmsbury to rule and homage in their own domains: Lord Venniker would speak of them as ‘atheists.’