This beautiful house under the Downs was already more than “sand and stone.” It was a giant, very gentle but very powerful, and adding to its power the lore of the family it was irresistible. This young mother had all the lore by heart and loved it, yet had fought against it. She had been happy when her child had grown at first unlike her own family and much like her husband’s; but no! his hair grew lighter, his nose was as those of her brothers’ in bud, and now that he was five he was not a child so much as an incarnation of the family, a sort of graven image to which the old man bowed down, and with all the more fervour because of that weakness in the boy which others thought imbecility. The old man, too, had been not only a man but a family; now that the child was there he waited, garrulously contented, for his release from the post. So contented was he that when the granddaughter left her child with him, and after delays and excuses and delays disappeared into the blank, indifferent abyss of the multitude far away who knew not the house and the family, he was not only contented but glad at heart, for it was a rebel that was gone. For several years the white beard and the poor child lived together happily, turning over old memories, old books, old toys, taking the old walks through the long garden, past, but not into, the beech wood that a whim of the old man’s had closed against even himself, against all save the birds and the squirrels; over the high downs and back into the deep vale which had produced that delicate physical beauty and those gracious lusty ways beyond which it seemed that men and women could hardly go in earthly life. Very happy were those two, and very placid; but within a week their tragic peace was perfected. The boy fell out of one of the apple-trees and was killed. The old man could not but stumble over that small grave into his own, and here is the end, the unnoted, the common end, and the epitaph written by the auctioneer and the rain. Much as I love rain, heavy or light, freakish or continuous, I am glad to be out of it for a little while and to open a book of ballads by a solitary fire at “The White Horse,” and soon to close it after reading again the lines-- “O then bespake her daughter dear, She was baith jimp and sma’: ‘O row me in a pair o’ sheets, And tow me owre the wa’!’ They row’d her in a pair o’ sheets, And tow’d her owre the wa’; But on the point o’ Gordon’s spear She gat a deadly fa’. O bonnie, bonnie was her mouth, And cherry were her cheeks, And clear, clear was her yellow hair, Whereon the red blood dreeps. Then wi’ his spear he turn’d her owre; O gin her face was wan! He said, ‘Ye are the first that e’er I wish’d alive again.’ He cam’ and lookit again at her; O gin her skin was white! ‘I might hae spared that bonnie face To hae been some man’s delight.