to days when both the house and manor took their name from their owner, the father of King Robert Bruce. The foundations of earlier buildings have been found deep beneath the lawn. On two of the bricks of the house there can still be read the first letters of names which were carved, as the date tells, when a Stuart was King in England. Through a narrow gate in the western boundary of the park, the path leads, across a quiet lane, into the churchyard. Here, as tradition told, the wall had been broken down when the last of the Lords Coleraine died, who had once owned the manor, and through the gap the body had been carried to its resting-place. Close by this little gate rose a graceful Lombardy poplar to the height of 100 feet—a landmark to all the country round. Through the trees, when winter had stripped them of their leaves, was seen from the windows of the Castle an ancient church-tower of singular beauty: ivy had covered it to the coping-stone with the growth of full two hundred years. When the foliage of summer hid it from the view, nevertheless it made its presence known by a peal of bells famous for their sweetness. The sound of the summoning bell might well inspire lofty thoughts and high aims, for it had once hung in the Citadel of Quebec, and had rung out the alarm when Wolfe stormed the heights of Abraham. The bells still remain, but the ivy has yielded to the ruthless hand of an ignorant restorer. The tower is ivy-mantled no more; and the graceful work of two long centuries has been in a moment wantonly cast away. This beautiful home was doubly endeared to Rowland Hill, for here he brought his bride, and here he spent the first six years of his wedded life. In the same summer that he left Hazelwood he had married the playmate of his childhood. His affection for her had grown with his growth, and had never for a moment wavered. He had long loved her with the deep but quiet love of a strong nature. He was no Orlando to character his thoughts on the barks of trees. Even to his Journal, though he kept it hidden from every eye but his own, he never entrusted his secret. Two years before he kept his golden wedding-day he noticed, it would seem, this silence so uncommon in a lover. “From motives of delicacy,” he noted down, “I avoided in my Journal all mention of my early attachment to C——.” If his early records were silent in her praise, yet, when he came to write the history of the great work of his life, he spoke out with no uncertain accents. “I cannot record my marriage,” he wrote, “without adding that my dear wife’s help in my subsequent toils, and not least in those best known to the public, was important, perhaps essential, to their success.” An old-fashioned friend of his family, who knew well how hard she had laboured in helping her husband in his great work, on hearing some one say that Mr. Rowland Hill was the Father of Penny Postage, quaintly remarked, “Then I know who was its Mother. It was his wife.” CHAPTER VIII.