Consideration indeed he obtained, and increase of wealth; but the wild manners and habits of his children greatly afflicted him; and having married a second wife, he was induced, in the hope of 'making a gentleman,' as he called it, of the boy she bore him, (none of the others having that ambition,) to commit him to the protection of a sister, the widow of a Jamaica planter, who had divided with him the bequest that had made his fortune, and being childless herself, desired to adopt him as her heir. Thus much of the early history of Mr. Gilbert was recollected with certainty, so late as the year 1782, by the villagers of Hillborough, the county-town already mentioned, who had so often shared his hospitality; but long before that time, he had vanished, with all his family, from the quiet, beautiful, and well-beloved valley. They were wont to speak with satisfaction of the good dinners they had eaten, the rare wines they had drunk, the merry frolics they had shared, in the Hawk's Hollow,--for so they perversely insisted upon calling what Mr. Gilbert, in right of possession, chose to designate as Avon-dale, in memory, or in honour of his own buxom river of Somerset; they related, too, to youthful listeners, the prophetic sagacity with which they had predicted violent ends to the young Hawks of Hawk-Hollow, (so they called the young Gilberts,) for their disobedience to father and mother, and their unusual passion for a life of adventure; and, finally, they shook their heads with suspicion and regret, when they spoke of Jessie, Gilbert's only daughter, of her early and mysterious death, and still more, to them, unaccountable burial. All that could be gathered in relation to this unhappy maiden, was dark and unsatisfactory: her death had seemingly, in some way, produced the destruction of the family and the alienation of the estate. It was an event of more than twenty years back; and from that period, until the time of his own sudden flight, Mr. Gilbert's doors were no longer open, and his sons were no more seen associated with the young men of the county. The maiden had died suddenly, and been interred in a private place on the estate.