The time was at hand which should bring the antagonism of Sir Roger Rockville to our friends in this history to an end. The severity which he had for so many years exercised towards all sorts of offenders, independent of his unconquerable repugnance to all the views and principles of advancing society, had made him the object of deepest vengeance. Eyes watched for him, ears listened for him, dark hearts burned in murderous breasts in lonely places, to discharge upon his head the collected fury of a thousand injuries. In a lonely hollow of his woods, watching at midnight with two of his men, there came a sturdy knot of poachers. An affray ensued. The men perceived that their old enemy, Sir Roger, was there, and the blow of a hedge-stake stretched him on the earth. His keepers fled. And thus ignominiously terminated the long line of the Rockvilles. The actual nature of the catastrophe was concealed at the time from the public, and the conservative newspaper of Castleborough announced that Sir Roger had died suddenly in his bed. It was true that he died in his bed, but it was from the lingering effects of the injury received in the wood. Sir Roger was the last of his line, but not of his class. There is a feudal art of sinking, which requires no study, and the Rockvilles are but one family amongst thousands who have perished in its practice. Scarcely had Sir Roger breathed his last, when his title and estate fell into litigation. Owing to two generations having passed with no other issue of the Rockville family than a single son and heir, the claims, though numerous, were so mingled with obscuring circumstances, and so equally balanced, that the lawyers raised quibbles and difficulties enough to keep it in chancery till they had not only consumed all the ready money and rental, but had made frightful inroads into the estate itself. To save the remnant, the contending parties came to a compromise. A neighbouring squire, whose grandfather had married a Rockville, was allowed to secure the title, on the condition that the residuum of the estate should be divided amongst the whole of the claimants. The woods and lands of Rockville were accordingly announced for sale. It was at this juncture that old William Watson reminded Simon Degge of a conversation in the great grove at Rockville which they had held at the time that Sir Roger was endeavouring to drive the people thence.