excruciated—you rubbed his sensitive hairs at
a furlong's distance.

The next Sunday the people found the
churchyard locked up, except during service,
when beadles walked there, and desired them
not to loiter and disturb the congregation,
closing the gates, and showing them out like
a flock of sheep the moment the service was
over. This was fuel to the already boiling
blood of Stockington. The week following,
what was their astonishment to find the much
frequented inn gone! it was actually gone!
not a trace of it; but the spot where it had
stood for ages, turfed, planted with young
spruce trees, and fenced off with post and rail!
The exasperated people now launched forth
an immensity of fulminations against the
churl Sir Roger, and a certain number of
them resolved to come and seat themselves
in the street of the hamlet and there dine;
but a terrific thunderstorm, which seemed
in league with Sir Roger, soon routed them,
drenched them through, and on attempting
to seek shelter in the cottages, the poor
people said they were very sorry, but it was
as much as their holdings were worth, and
they dare not admit them.

Sir Roger had triumphed! It was all over
with the old delightful days at Rockville.
There was an end of pic-nic-ing, of fishing, and
of roving in the islands. One sturdy disciple
of Izaak Walton, indeed, dared to fling a line
from the banks of Rockville grove, but Sir
Roger came upon him and endeavoured to
seize him. The man coolly walked into the
middle of the river, and, without a word,
continued his fishing.

"Get out there!" exclaimed Sir Roger,
"that is still on my property." The man
walked through the river to the other bank,
where he knew that the land was rented by a
farmer. "Give over," shouted Sir Roger, "I
tell you the water is mine."

"Then," said the fellow, " bottle it up, and
be hanged to you! Don't you see it is running
away to Stockington"

There was bad blood between Rockville
and Stockington for ever. Stockington was
incensed, and Sir Roger was hairsore.

A new nuisance sprung up. The people of
Stockington looked on the cottagers of
Rockville as sunk in deepest darkness under
a man as Sir Roger and his cousin the vicar.
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 Stockingtonians 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 the
spiritual 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 Stockingtonians now
fulminated awful judgments on the unhappy Sir
Roger, as a persecutor and a malignant. They
dared not enter again on his parish, 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 position 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
stealing to  and fro in his fields and planta-
tions, and prowling along his river side. He
lurked under hedges, and watched for long
hours under the 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
angry 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 that he did. He went
to church on Sundays, 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
different corners of the fine iron tracery,
bearing evidence of the long period since it
had been opened. How different to the time
when the Sir Roger and Lady of Rockville
had had these gates thrown wide on a 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 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
the 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 were 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,
once clearly very beautiful. It was now