Just before he left St. Luke’s he had been reading Darwin’s _Origin of Species_, and in the light of this work the efforts of his father, followed by those of his cousin Joe, seemed to him an excellent instance of the tendency of ancient stocks to vary or sport in definite directions. In the earnest Joe Edwin found the phenomenon a little troublesome, for the sight of the immense energies that the youth was putting into channels that were futile distressed him, and the more so because to correct the waste it would have been necessary to begin again from a point so distant that Joe would be faced with the spectacle of more than half of his present energies wasted. So Edwin thought as little as the consciousness of his own selfishness would allow him, of all the labours that were typified by the fretwork mahogany frames that surrounded the photographs of the Halesby Inglebys, listening instead to the endless tales of his Aunt Sarah Jane, in the hour when she became talkative, after supper. By this time Edwin was so interested in his own romantic origins that any story of the old Highberrow would do for him; and his aunt, with her soft Somerset voice, her picturesque phrasing, and her unfailing memory for social details, rebuilt, night after night, the life of the decayed village as it had been in the old dowser’s time, evolving by degrees a human comedy which resembled that of its great exemplar by the way in which the protagonists of one episode became mere incidentals to another. Edwin knew them all by name, and recognised them as if he had met them in the flesh whenever he heard of them. In this way, sitting in the smell of the window geraniums over a leisurely supper of bread and cheese, in his uncle’s case literally washed down with cider, he heard a story that he always remembered with pride and pity and a degree of passionate resentment: the story of how the village of his fathers had sunk into decay.