In connexion with this event, some, more garrulous than others, were wont to speak of Colonel Falconer, the present proprietor of Hawk-Hollow, as having had some agency in the catastrophe; but what it was, they either knew not, or they feared to speak. Evil suspicions, however, gathered about this gentleman's name; and as he was seldom, if ever, seen in Hawk-Hollow in person, but had committed the stewardship of the property to the hands of a distant relative, who resided on it, the young felt themselves at liberty to fill up from imagination, the sketch left imperfect by the old; and accordingly, the Colonel, in time, came to be considered by those who had never seen him, as one of the darkest-hearted and most dangerous of his species. He was very rich; the station he occupied in the eyes of his country was lofty, and might have been esteemed noble; for he had shed his blood in the great and fearful battle of rights that was now approaching to a close; and after being disabled by severe and honourable wounds, he had changed the sphere of his exertions, and was now as ardent and devoted a patriot in the senate as he had been before in the field. Yet in this distant quarter, these recommendations to favour were forgotten; it was said, if he had done good deeds, there were evil ones enough to bury them as in a mountain, and if he had fought well for his country, he had struggled still more devotedly to aggrandize himself. In a word, he was called a hard, avaricious, rapacious man, whose chief business was to enrich himself at the cost of the less patriotic, and who had got the mastery of more sequestrated estates than an honest man could have come by. It was a sin of an unpardonable nature, that he had succeeded in getting possession of Hawk-Hollow, when there were so many others in the county who had set their hearts upon it.