of his own property—stole in at a little side-gate from his paddock, and back the same way, wondering all the time whether there was not somebody in his pheasant preserves, or Sunday trespassers in his grove. If you entered his house, it gave you as cheerless a feeling as its owner. There was a conservatory, so splendid with rich plants and flowers in his mother’s time, now a dusty receptacle of hampers, broken hand-glasses and garden tools. These tools could never be used, for the gardens had grown wild. Tall grass grew in the walks, and the huge unpruned shrubs disputed the passage with you. In the wood above the gardens, reached by several flights of fine, but now moss-grown steps, there stood a pavilion, which had once clearly been very beautiful. It was now damp and ruinous—its walls covered with greenness and crawling insects. It was a great lurking place of Sir Roger, when on the watch for poachers. The line of the Rockvilles was evidently running fast out. It had reached the extremity of imbecility and contempt—it must soon reach its close. Sir Roger used to make his regular annual visit to town; but of late, when there he had wandered restlessly about the streets peeping into the shop-windows: and if it rained, he would stand under an entry for hours, waiting till it was gone over, rather than take a cab or omnibus. The habit of lurking and peering about was become fixed, and his feet bore him instinctively into those narrow and crowded alleys where swarm the poachers of the city—the trespassers and anglers in the game preserves and streams of humanity. He had lost all pleasure in his club; the most exciting themes of political life retained no piquancy for him. His old friends ceased to find any pleasure in him. He was become the driest of all dry wells. Poachers, and anglers, and Methodists, haunted the wretched purlieus of his fast fading-out mind, and he resolved to go to town no more. His whole nature was centred in his woods. He was for ever on the watch; and when at Rockville again, if he heard a door clap when in bed, he thought it a gun in his woods; and was up and out with his keepers. Of what value was that magnificent estate to him? those superb woods; those finely-hanging cliffs; that clear and _riante_ river, careering, travelling on, and taking a noble sweep below his window; that glorious expanse of most verdant meadows, stretching almost to Castleborough, and enlivened by numerous herds of the most beautiful cattle; those old farms and shady lanes overhung with hazel and wild rose; the glittering brook, and the songs of woodland birds—what were they to that worn-out old man, that victim to the delusive doctrine of blood, that man-trap, of an hereditary name?