When the strident voices had departed, when time had made the school-house part and parcel of the place, like the cottages, Mary changed her ways, and occasionally called there. She took a class once a week of the elder girls, and taught them in her own fashion at home--most unorthodox teaching it was--in which the works of the best poets were the chief subjects, and portfolios of engravings were found on the table. Long since father and daughter had resumed their walks together. It was in this way that James Thardover made his estate his own--he held possession by right of labour. He was resident ten months out of twelve, and after all these public and open works he did far more in private. There was not an acre on the property which he had not personally visited. The farm-houses and farm-buildings were all known to him. He rode from tenancy to tenancy; he visited the men at plough, and stood among the reapers. Neither the summer heat nor the winds of March prevented him from seeing with his own eyes. The latest movement was the silo system, the burying of grass under pressure, instead of making it into hay. By these means the clouds are to be defied, and a plentiful supply of fodder secured. Time alone can show whether this, the latest invention, is any more powerful than steam-plough or guano to uphold agriculture against the shocks of fortune. But James Thardover would have tried any plan that had been suggested to him. It was thus that he laid hold on his lands with the strongest of titles--the work of his own hands. Yet still the tenants were unable to pay the former rent. Some had failed or left, and their farms were vacant; and nothing could be more discouraging than the condition of affairs upon the property. III.--A RING-FENCE: CONCLUSION There were great elms in the Out-park, whose limbs or boughs, as large as the trunk itself, came down almost to the ground. They touched the tops of the white wild parsley; and when sheep were lying beneath, the jackdaws stepped from the sheep's back to the bough and returned again. The jackdaws had their nests in the hollow places of these elms; for the elm as it ages becomes full of cavities. These great trees often divided into two main boughs, rising side by side, and afar off visible as two dark streaks among the green. For many years no cattle had been permitted in the park, and the boughs of the trees had grown in a drooping form, as they naturally do unless eaten or broken by animals pushing against them. But since the times of agricultural pressure, a large part of the domain had been fenced off, and was now partly grazed and partly mown, being called the Out-park. There were copses at the farther side, where in spring the may flowered; the purple orchis was drawn up high by the trees and bushes--twice as high as its fellows in the mead, where a stray spindle-tree grew; and from these copses the cuckoos flew round the park.