The storm which had made shipwreck of the fortunes of Ephraim Lovegrove had leveled with the earth prouder roof-trees than his. In early life he had succeeded his father as the tenant of a farm in Wiltshire. He was industrious, careful, and ambitious; and aided by the sum of £500, which he received with his wife, and the high prices which agricultural produce obtained during the French war, he was enabled, at the expiration of his lease in Wiltshire, to become the proprietor of Bursley Farm. This purchase was effected when wheat ranged from £30 to £40 a load, at a proportionately exorbitant price of £5000. His savings amounted to about one half of this sum, and the remainder was raised by way of mortgage. Matters went on smoothly enough till the peace of 1815, and the subsequent precipitate fall in prices. Lovegrove showed gallant fight, hoping against hope that exceptional legislation would ultimately bolster up prices to something like their former level. He was deceived. Every day saw him sinking lower and lower; and in the sixth year of peace he was reluctantly compelled to abandon the long since desperate and hopeless struggle with adverse fortune. The interest on the borrowed money had fallen considerably in arrear, and Bursley Farm was sold by auction at a barely sufficient sum to cover the mortgage and accumulated interest. The stock was similarly disposed of, and stout Ephraim withdrew with his family to a small cottage in the neighborhood of his old home, possessed, after his debts were discharged, of about thirty pounds in money and a few necessary articles of furniture. The old man's heart was broken: he took almost immediately to his bed, and after a long agony of physical pain, aggravated and embittered by mental disquietude and discontent, expired, as we have seen, worn out in mind and body.