“What a divine pleasure,” said Mr. Degge, “might this man enjoy if he had a heart capable of letting others enjoy themselves. If he could but see that the laws of property should be maintained in consistency with the laws of God: that He has given the rentals of the earth to individuals, but that He has never repealed his great law which gives the whole earth to the undivided race of man: that the rentals may be enjoyed by the individual possessors without infringement of the general enjoyment of the pleasures of nature by society at large. These different kinds of possession may surely co-exist without one interfering with the other.” “But we talk without the estate,” William Watson had said; “what might we do if we were tried with it?” Mr. Degge, when reminded of this conversation, was silent for a moment, and then replied, that there was sound philosophy in William’s remark. He said no more, but went away, and the next day announced to the astonished old man that he had purchased the groves and the whole ancient estate of Rockville. Simon Degge, the last of a long line of paupers, had become the possessor of the noble estate of Sir Roger Rockville of Rockville, the last of a long line of aristocrats! It may be imagined what was the consternation of the whole Bullockshed and Tenterhook clan; what the delightful amazement of Woodburn, Cotmanhaye, and all Castleborough. To the squirearchy of the old school, the audacity of this purchase surpassed the range of their limited imaginations. This daring and fortunate quondam pauper, and present manufacturing millionaire, squatted down, as they expressed it, amid all the woods and lands, amid all the ancient honours of the line of Rockville. To them it portended something very like the end of the world. They saw all the old fixedness of ancestry and soil broken up, and the despised men of spindles and looms invading everything which to them was sacred. It seemed that Sir Roger and all his ghostly forefathers and foremothers must rise up and scare, in the midnight hours, the plebeian new comers from their hall and possessions of nearly a thousand years. It seemed as if those stately monuments and procumbent effigies of so many Rockvilles in armour, ruffs, and farthingales, must start up from their tombs in the old church, saturated as it was with the presence and emblazoned with the arms and glorious epitaphs of the Rockvilles. But they all remained perfectly quiescent; neither chiselled stone nor ancestral spirit moved. Nature received these _terræ filii_ with as much equanimity and indifference as it had received the Norman hordes before. There was neither storm-wind nor earthquake, but the still small voice of reason was heard whispering in many quarters, that whenever man puts forth his powers he makes himself the lord of the circumstances around him; whenever he sinks into sloth and imbecility, nature throws him from her weird shoulders, as the vigorous but interloping