He had a singularly pleasant smile, this young man, though this was not a time to display it. Mrs. Dean had once pronounced him a pippin grafted on a crab-stock, and thereafter in certain circles he had become known as King Pepin. He was tall and straight and open-eyed, with faults enough, but of a generous youthful kind, easily overlooked and more easily forgiven. Doubtless Mr. Swainson would have had his son more practical, cool-headed, and precise, but the shoot did not grow in the same way as the parent tree. Old Swainson would not have been happy without an enemy, nor young Swainson as happy with one; and if, as the former often said, the latter's worst enemy was himself, he was likely to have a prosperous life. In a space of time inconceivably short, the doings of the old lawyer and the Dean's remonstrance were all over Bicester. Nay, fast as the stone rolled, it gathered moss. It was asserted by people who rapid-grew to be eye-witnesses, that Mr. Swainson had danced a hornpipe in the middle of his plot, snapping his fingers at the Dean, while the latter prodded him as well as he could through the railings with his umbrella; finally that only the arrival of Mr. Swainson's son had put an end to this disgraceful exhibition. Neither side wasted time. The Dean, the Canon in residence, and the Præcentor, an active young fellow, consulted their lawyer, and talked largely of ejectment, title, and seisin. Mr. Swainson, having nine points of the law in his favour, and as well acquainted with the tenth as his opponent's legal adviser, devoted himself to the fighter pursuit of the mallet and hoop. In a state of felicity undreamt of before, he played, or affected to play, croquet, his right hand against his left, the former giving the latter two hoops and a cage. He played with a cage and a bell; it was more cheerful. Of course all Bicester found occasion to pass through the Close and see this great sight, while every window in the precincts was raised, that visitors might hear the tap, tap of the sacrilegious mallet. The Cathedral lawyer, urged to take some step, and well versed in the strength of the enemy's position, was fairly nonplussed. While he pondered, with a certain grim amusement, over Mr. Swainson's crotchet, which did not present itself to his legal mind in so dreadful a light as to the mind clerical, some unknown person took action, and made it war to the knife. "Who did it?" Bicester asked when it rose one morning, to find Mr. Swainson in a state of mind which seemed to call for a padded room and a strait waistcoat. Some one during the night had thrown down the iron railing, taken up and broken the hoops, crushed the bell, and snapped the pegs; all this in the neatest possible manner, and with no damage to the turf. War to the knife indeed! Mr. Swainson, like the famous Widdrington, would have fought upon his stumps on such a provocation.