A new nuisance sprang up. The people of Castleborough looked on the cottagers of Rockville as sunk in the deepest darkness under Sir Roger, and his cousin the vicar, who had seconded, and it was believed had instigated the baronet to a great portion of these proceedings. They could not pic-nic, but they thought they could hold a camp-meeting. They could not fish for roach, but they thought they might for souls. Accordingly, there assembled crowds of Castleburghians on the green of Rockville, with a chair and a table, and a preacher with his head bound in a red handkerchief; and soon there was a sound of hymns, and a zealous call to come out of the darkness of Babylon. But this was more than Sir Roger could bear; he rushed forth with all his servants, keepers, and cottagers, overthrew the table, and routing the assembly, chased them to the boundary of his estate. The discomfited Castleburghians now fulminated awful judgments on the unhappy Sir Roger, as a persecutor and malignant. They dared not enter again on his park, but they came to the very verge of it, and held weekly meetings on the highway, in which they sang and declaimed as loudly as possible, that the winds might bear their voices to Sir Roger’s ears. To such a condition was now reduced the last of the long line of Rockville. The spirit of a policeman had taken possession of him; he had keepers and watchers out on all sides, but that did not satisfy him. He was perpetually haunted with the idea that poachers were after his game; that trespassers were in his woods. His whole life was now spent in strolling to and fro in his fields and plantations, and in prowling along his river-side. He looked under hedges, and watched for long hours under forest trees. If any one had a curiosity to see Sir Roger, they had only to enter his fields by the wood side, and wander a few yards from the path, and he was almost sure to spring out over the hedge, and in hurried and angry, almost stammering tones, demand their name and address. The descendant of the chivalrous and steel-clad De Rockvilles was sunk into a restless spy on his own ample property. There was but one idea in his mind—encroachment. It was destitute of all other furniture but the musty technicalities of warrants and commitments. There was a stealthy and skulking manner in everything he did. He went to church on Sunday, but it was no longer by the grand iron-gate opposite to his house,—that stood generally with a large spider’s web woven over the lock, and several others in the corners of the fine iron tracery, bearing evidence of the long period since it had been opened. How different to the time when Sir Roger and Lady Rockville had had these gates thrown wide on Sunday morning, and with all their train of household servants at their back, with true antique dignity, marched, with much proud humility, into the house of God. Now, Sir Roger—the solitary, suspicious, undignified Sir Roger, the keeper and policeman