the nature of that sole Divinity who shines
by His own effulgence. "Thus," the volume
closes, "the man who perceives, in his own
soul, the supreme soul present in all creatures,
acquires equanimity towards them all, and
shall be absorbed at last in the highest
essence, even that of the Almighty Himself."

MY LADY LUDLOW.

CHAPTER THE FOURTEENTH AND LAST.

LIKE many other things which have been
declared to be impossible, this report of
Captain James being attentive to Miss
Brooke turned out to be very true.

The mere idea of her agent being on the
slightest possible terms of acquaintance with
the Dissenter, the tradesman, the Birmingham
democrat, who had come to settle in our
good, orthodox, aristocratic, and agricultural
Hanbury, made my lady very uneasy. Miss
Galindo's misdemeanor in having taken
Miss Bessy to live with her, faded into a
mistake, a mere error of judgment, in
comparison with Captain James's intimacy at
Yeast House, as the Brookes called their
ugly square-built farm. My lady talked
herself quite into complacency with Miss
Galindo, and even Miss Bessy was named by
her, the first time I had ever been aware that
my lady recognised her existence; but—I
recollect it was a long rainy afternoon, and I
sate with her ladyship, and we had time and
opportunity for a long uninterrupted talk—
whenever we had been silent for a little
while, she began again, with something like
a wonder how it was that Captain James
could ever have commenced an acquaintance
with "that man Brooke." My lady recapitulated
all the times she could remember
that anything had occurred, or been said by
Captain James which she could now understand
as throwing light upon the subject.

"He said once that he was anxious to bring
in the Norfolk system of cropping, and spoke
a good deal about Mr. Coke of Holkham
(who, by the way, was no more a Coke than
I am—collateral in the female line—which
counts for little or nothing among the great
old commoners' families of pure blood), and
his new ways of cultivation; of course new
men bring in new ways, but it does not follow
that either are better than the old ways. However,
Captain James has been very anxious to
try turnips and bone manure; and he really
is a man of such good sense and energy, and
was so sorry last year about the failure, that I
consented; and now I begin to see my error.
I have always heard that town bakers
adulterate their flour with bone dust; and, of
course, Captain James would be aware of
this, and go to Brooke to inquire where the
article was to be purchased."

My lady always ignored the fact which
had sometimes, I suspect, been brought under
her very eyes during her drives, that Mr.
Brooke's few fields were in a state of far
higher cultivation than her own; so she
could not, of course, perceive that there was
any wisdom to be gained from asking the
advice of the tradesman turned farmer.

But by and bye this fact of her agent's
intimacy with the person whom in the whole
world she most disliked (with that sort of
dislike in which a large amount of
uncomfortableness is combined—the dislike which
conscientious people sometimes feel to another
without knowing why, and yet which they
cannot indulge in with comfort to themselves
without having a moral reason why), came
before my lady in many shapes. For, indeed,
I am sure that Captain James was not a man
to conceal or be ashamed of one of his actions.
I cannot fancy his ever lowering his strong
loud clear voice, or having a confidential
conversation with any one. When his crops had
failed, all the village had known it. He
complained, he regretted, he was angry, or
owned himself a—— fool, all down the village
street; and the consequence was that,
although he was a far more passionate man
than Mr. Horner, all the tenants liked him
far better. People, in general, take a kindlier
interest in any one, the workings of whose
mind and heart they can watch and understand,
than in a man who only lets you know
what he has been thinking about and feeling,
by what he does. But Harry Gregson was
faithful to the memory of Mr. Horner. Miss
Galindo has told me that she used to watch
him hobble out of the way of Captain James,
as if to accept his notice, however good-
naturedly given, would have been a kind of
treachery to his former benefactor. But
Gregson (the father) and the new agent
rather took to each other, and one day, much
to my surprise, I heard that the "poaching,
tinkering vagabond," as people used to call
Gregson when I first had come to live at
Hanbury, had been appointed gamekeeper;
Mr. Gray standing godfather, as it were, to
his trustworthiness, if he were trusted with
anything; which I thought at the time was
rather an experiment, only it answered, as
many of Mr. Gray's deeds of daring did. It
was curious how he was growing to be a kind
of autocrat in the village; and how
unconscious he was of it. He was as shy and
awkward and nervous as ever, in every affair
that was not of some moral consequence to
him. But as soon as he was convinced that
a thing was right, he "shut his eyes and ran
and butted at it like a ram," as Captain
James once expressed it, in talking over
something Mr. Gray had done. People in
the village said, "they never knew what the
parson would be at next;" or they might
have said, "where his reverence would next
turn up." For I have heard of his marching
right into the middle of a set of poachers,
gathered together for some desperate midnight
enterprise, or walking into a public-
house that lay just beyond the bounds of my
lady's estate, and in that extra-parochial