Morton appeared at the conclusion of the disastrous quarrel, and it was reserved for him to put a stop to the deluge of blood that had been ruthlessly shed for so many years,--computed to have cost a hundred thousand lives,--decimating his native land, and by uniting and neutralizing the contending claims, bring it peace. A statesman-like mission of the first importance, and carried out with such consummate wisdom, that it has been aptly said, "he joined the Roses, that is, he brought about the union of the Houses of York and Lancaster, for that was his doing, and, so far as can now be seen, would not have been done but for him. He made the Tudor dynasty, and his name is buried under his own creation." So ends our little story,--such are the momentous issues, that fill the mind's eye, amid this rural quietness, as our steps make homeward. Evening is approaching, and leaving the interesting precincts of North-Bradley church, our path back to Trowbridge,--discerned afar by its hood of smoke,--leads through some pleasant meadows by way of Suthwyke. Here we halt for a moment to take a final look at the old place, and first home of Stafford in these parts. If deserted, one after another, by its antient possessors, it now appears shorn of the original dignity that man's transitory occupation once conferred upon it, and of which nothing but a memory remains, Nature, unchanging, still continues to adorn it with her charms, and specially so just at present, for the trees in the orchard that skirts the Court are in full bloom, some of them "white as a sheet with blooth" (as the old Saxon idiom of the west-country peasantry expressively describes it), and others loaded with clusters of variously expanded chalices of all shades of that inimitable pink, the which--for want of other satisfactory description,--we are content to call "apple-blossom." There, across the moat, lived the first Sir Humphrey,--this we know,--but what voice shall come back from the Past, and point us to the site of the cottage, wherein the future Archbishop--his presumed son--first saw the light? All is silent. Of the last resting-places of the Staffords of Suthwyke, greater certainty exists, and widely divided are they all in death.