For down across the turf walked Hartover leading his horse, hat in hand. Beside him, in blue-sprigged muslin gown and lilac sun-bonnet, walked Nellie. As we stepped out of the doorway she caught sight of us, and the sound of her voice came in soft but rapid speech. The young man, whose head inclined towards her, looked up and gallantly waved his hat. They reached the bottom of the slope, and as they stood side by side on the bank, the great brown hunter, extending its neck, snuffed the coolth off the water. Only the brimming stream and bright garden lay between them and us. ‘Mr. Braithwaite,’ Hartover called, ‘shall I be forced to run away with her? Time and place favour it; and, Gad! sir, my horse has plenty left in him yet.’ He slipped his arm round the girl’s waist and made a feint of tossing her on to the saddle. ‘Confound the fellow’s impudence!’ Braithwaite growled, as he moved back into the house. But his eyes were wet. He was beaten. Youth and love had won the day, and he knew it. Thus came the end, or rather the beginning. For the end—as I look across the valley this morning at royal Hover, wrapped in that glittering mantle of new-fallen snow—is not, please God, for a long time yet. Still, in point of fact, Nellie Braithwaite never became Lady Hartover. For Braithwaite exacted an interval of six months before the wedding; and before those same six months were out the poor creaking gate, away at Bath, had creaked itself finally out of earthly existence, and into—let us charitably hope—a more profitable heavenly one; while—such after all is the smooth working of our aristocratic and hereditary system, with its _le roi est mort, vive le roi_—over his great possessions his son, my always very dear, and sometime very naughty, pupil, reigned in his stead. As to myself, Cambridge and Hover, Hover and Cambridge, till, the home living falling vacant, I removed myself and my books here to this pleasant parsonage, where learned and unlearned, gentle and simple, young and old, are good enough to come and visit me, and confide to me their hopes, and joys, disappointments, sorrows, and sometimes—poor souls—their sins. THE END. _THE TERCENTENARY OF RICHARD HAKLUYT._ _November 23, 1616._