The excuse that my father might have alleged was that he was by no means wholly dependent either on his profession or on his farm, or on the not inconsiderable property which he had inherited from his father or enjoyed in right of his wife. He had an old maternal uncle, Adolphus Meetkerke, who lived on his estate near Royston in Hertfordshire, called Julians. Mr. Meetkerke--the descendant of a Dutchman who had come to this country some time in the eighteenth century as diplomatic representative of his country, and had settled here--lived at Julians with an old childless wife--the daughter, I believe, of a General Chapman--and my father was his declared heir. He had another nephew, Mr. John Young, as flourishing and prosperous an attorney as my father was an unsuccessful and unprosperous barrister. John Young, too, was as worthy and as highly-respected a man as any in the profession. But my father, as settled long years before, was to be the heir; and I was in due time shown to the tenantry as their future landlord, and all that sort of thing. I suppose my grandfather, the Rev. Anthony Trollope, of Cottenham in Hertfordshire, married an elder sister of old Adolphus Meetkerke, while the father of John Young married a younger one. And so, come what might of the Harrow farm and the new house, I was to be the future owner of Julians, and live on my own acres. Again, _Dîs aliter visum_! I well remember more than one visit to Julians with my parents about this time--visits singularly contrasted with those to my Grandfather Milton, the vicar of Heckfield. The house and establishment at Julians were on a far more pretentious scale than the home of the vicar, and the mode of life in the squire’s establishment larger and freer. But I liked Heckfield better than Julians; partly, I think, even at that early age, because the former is situated in an extremely pretty country, whereas the neighbourhood of the other is by no means such. But I please myself with thinking, and do really believe, that the main reason for the preference was that the old Bristol saddler’s son was a far more highly-cultured man than the Hertfordshire squire. He was a good man, too, was old Adolphus Meetkerke; a good landlord, a kindly natured man, a good sportsman, an active magistrate, and a good husband to his old wife. But there was a sort of flavour of roughness about the old squire and his surroundings which impressed itself on my observation even in those days, and would, I take it, nowadays be deemed almost clownish rusticity.