“I’m under notice to quit, too, you know,” said Chase, rather embarrassed, as though they had brought a gentle reproof against him, trying to excuse himself by this joke. “I know that, sir; we’re sorry,” the man had said instantly. (Sorry. They had never seen him before, yet they were sorry.) “Miss Chase, your aunt, sir, liked my garden properly,” said the man. “She’d stop here always, in her pony-chaise, and have a look at my flowers. She’d say to me, chaffing-like, ‘You’ve a better show than me, Jakes.’ But she didn’t like peonies. I had a fine clump of peonies and she made me dig it up. Lord, she was a tartar—saving your presence, sir. But a good heart, so nobody took no notice. But peonies—no, she wouldn’t have peonies at any price.” “There’s few folks in this village ever thought to see Blackboys in other hands than Chase’s,” said the woman. “’Tis the peacocks will be grieved—dear! dear!” “The peacocks?” Chase had repeated. “Folks about here do say, the peacocks’ll die off when Blackboys goes from Chase’s hands,” said the man. “They be terrible hard on a garden, though, do be peacocks,” he had said further, meticulously removing another weed from among his pinks. V That had been an experience to Chase, a milestone on his road. He was to experience much the same sensation when his lands received him. It was a new world to him—new because it was so old—ancient and sober according to the laws of nature. There was here a rhythm which no flurry could disturb. The seasons ordained, and men lived close up against the rulings so prescribed, close up against the austere laws, at once the masters and the subjects of the land that served them and that they as loyally served. Chase perceived his mistake; he perceived it with surprise and a certain reverence. Because the laws were unalterable they were not necessarily stagnant. They were of a solemn order, not arbitrarily framed or admitting of variation according to the caprice of mankind. In the place of stagnation, he recognized stability. And as his vision widened he saw that the house fused very graciously with the trees, the meadows, and the hills, grown there in place no less than they, a part of the secular tradition. He reconsidered even the pictures, not as the representation of meaningless ghosts, but as men and women whose blood had gone to the making of that now in his own veins. It was the land, the farms, the rickyards, the sown, the fallow, that taught him this wisdom. He learnt it slowly, and without knowing that he learnt. He absorbed it in the company of men such he had never previously known, and who treated him as he had never before been treated—not with deference only, which would have confused him, but with a paternal kindliness, a quiet familiarity, an acquaintance immediately linked by virtue of tradition. To them he, the clerk of Wolverhampton, was, quite simply, Chase of Blackboys. He came to value the smile in