hot and tired. Where is my cousin Constantine? I want an introduction, and hope to find him more on the alert than you.' What! that gentleman in tatters!

She looked about her.

Hush hark, the dogs do bark,

The beggars are coming to Towan,

Some in rags, and some in jags

Why! Bless me, Gerans! Are you twins? You are so much alike that you must mistake each other for self at times.'

Constantine coloured at the reference to his torn coat. 'I apologise for appearing before you in this figure,' he said; but she interrupted him, her quick blue eye had caught sight of a young man turning his horse to ride away. 'Here!' she exclaimed, catching up her habit with one hand, and waving the whip imperiously with the other, 'No skulking off, Mr. Penhalligan. I have just caught you in the act of executing a retreat, when the general sounded a summons to table. Stay!'

'Miss Trewhella, one must be driven from your presence-one is not disposed to skulk from it,' answered the young man, a dark handsome man, seated on a rough cob.

'Well said, Mr. Penhalligan,' laughed the girl. There is a polish of politeness about you which is so rare an element at Towan that we prize it when it is found. I doubt not but that in proper hands something may be made out of you.'

'Anything may be made out of me, if you, Miss Trewhella, will put your hand to the moulding.'

'I have neither the patience nor the skill,' said Rose Trewhella, laughing; 'I am doing my best to civilize Uncle Hender, but the result does not reward the pains.' Then, suddenly, in an altered tone, 'Why is not your sister, Loveday, out with us to-day?'

'Because I have no second horse on which she can ride.' 'Oh, you bad brother-like all men, selfish. You should have stayed at home, and sent her out.'

'Then, consider, there was no groom to look after her.'

'I have none to-day. I allowed my groom, Gerans, to leave, so that he might go to Wadebridge, and bring thence his double. If it were possible for me to ride without a groom, surely it was possible also for Loveday.'

'Every gentleman in the field, Miss Trewhella, is your dutiful servant.'

And the same to Loveday. Have you noticed how I have pcuted all day? It has been because your sister was not with us.'

'How do you do, Dennis?' said Gerans, coming up beside the dark young man, and patting the neck of his cob. 'What sort of a run have you had? How did this mare keep up?'

Penhalligan shook his head. Only a cob, I can't keep

hunters.'

'How is your sister?' asked Gerans, passing over the reply without notice. 'Oh! here is Constantine. Do you see him? He has returned home for a change.'

Constantine came up, awkwardly, with his eyes on the ground; but that may have been due to disgust at appearing in a torn coat. He held out his hand.

Dennis Penhalligan did not meet the extended fingers, he pretended to overlook the proffered hand. 'Constantine and I must have a talk,' he said; then he turned the head of his horse and rode away to the stable-yard to hitch up his beast.

CHAPTER II.

ROSE TREWHELLA.

THE party of huntsmen were assembled in the hall of Towan House. The hall was low, lighted by a long five-light granite window looking to the east. It had an immense open granite fireplace, in which a log was smouldering upon a pair of andirons, banked up with peat, that diffused an agreeable odour through the room. The hall was panelled with oak and ornamented with stags' horns. Towan in past times was said to have had a deerpark, but the park had consisted merely of a walled paddock of some ten acres, in which was a spring of pure water, with some gnarled, crouching thorns above it.

The wall of the deer paddock remained in places, but the greater portion was broken down; of the deer, all that remained were the few horns on the wall, poor and stunted as the trees that grew on that coast. The horns were fitted into very rudely cut heads of oak, shaped by a village carpenter in past times.

The Gaverocks were an old Cornish family, untainted by intermixture with Saxon or Norman blood. They had married and intermarried with ancient families of extraction as pure, and of name as Keltic, as their own: the Killiowes, the Bodrugans, the Mennynnicks, the Nanspians, the Rosvargus, and the Chynoweths. It cannot be said that they had fallen from their high estate, for

they had lost none of their land, but they had remained stationary, whilst other families had mounted and others had declined. Two hundred-nay, even a hundred years ago, there was scarcely a parish in the West of England without two, three, or more resident gentry in it, owning good estates, dividing the parish between them, marrying in and out with each other, and leaving yeomen to flourish in the interstices between their estates. Most have disappeared. Here and there one remains, who has bought up his failing neighbours, and established himself as sole squire in the place. Among these petty gentry the lord of the manor exercised pre-eminence. He had certain rights over the lands of his neighbours, which they were unable to resist, and he unwilling to resign. Sometimes there were two manors in the same parish, and then he whose manor included the church-town was accorded the pre-eminence. A silent and mysterious revolution has taken place in the social conditions. The small gentry and most of the yeomanry have disappeared-how is not so easy to establish as the fact of their disappearance.'

The old country gentlemen of small estate, but of splendid pedigree, farmed their own lands, and were not ashamed to have their mansions surrounded by stacks and barns. Indeed, in many instances, the grand entrance was through the farmyard by a paved way, between heaps and pits of dung, to the manor-house, which formed one side, whilst outhouses, stables, and barns enclosed the quadrangle.

Devon and Cornwall are strewn with these old mansions, like empty snail shells. The gentry have left them, died or disappeared, and they are converted into farmhouses or cottages. The advance of civilisation had so far affected the Gaverocks that they had swept away their quadrangle and rebuilt their farm outhouses behind instead of in front of the house. Turf now grew

The parish of Bratton Clovelly, in Devon, covers an area of little over 8,000 acres. Down to 1750 there were seven gentle families resident in it: landowners, with right to bear arms. The Willoughbies, an elder branch of the family of Lord Willoughby d'Eresby, the Coryndons, Langesfords, Calmadys, Burnebys, the Parkers, ancestors of Lord Morley, the Incledons, and the Luxmores, all have vanished from it.

2 The old house of the Parkers in Bratton Clovelly, Ellacott, inherited from the heiress of Ellacott, but of more recent date than the marriage, has the house forming one side, and 'cob' barns, and stables, and cowsheds enclosing a quadrangle and opening into it. All the dwelling-house windows looked into this farmyard. A pair of handsome gates-now destroyed-admitted to farmyard and dwelling-house alike.

where the stable-yard had been for centuries, and a few eschalonia defied the winds and flowered like alpine roses. But if the face of the house had gained in respectability by the removal of the yard, it had lost in shelter. The east wind now rushed unbroken against it, and drove in at the porch, slamming doors throughout the house whenever any one entered or quitted the mansion by the main entrance. The characteristic feature of all these old dwelling-houses had been that they never looked out upon the world; they were screened behind walls, and every window looked into a court or an enclosed garden. The courts were sometimes many-cells into which the sun entered and where it was caught as in a trap, but out of which the rude winds were excluded. Now that this feature of Towan was effaced, Towan was a draughty place-battered by storm, piped through, screamed into, swashed about with wind and rain.

Miss Rose Trewhella, who called Squire Gaverock her uncle and his sons her cousins, was no relation by blood, though a connexion by marriage. Her father had married a lady who was somehow related to some lady who had at some time married a Gaverock. Her father was dead, and had left his daughter to the care of his friend of many years-Hender Gaverock, of Towan. Trewhella (his Christian name was Roseclear) had lived in another part of the country, but he had visited his friend annually for a month at Towan, and Gaverock had annually returned the visit for the same length of time. Till the death of Mr. Trewhella, the young Gaverocks had seen nothing of Rose. He had not brought her with him when he came to Towan because Hender had no daughter with whom she might associate when there.

Rose was Roseclear Trewhella's only child. She was a wayward, spoiled girl; was very pretty, and conscious both of her beauty and of the fact that she was an heiress. She was delicately fair, with hair like gold, and eyes blue as the summer sea, and a complexion so clear and bright that no one could look on her and deny that she had been given at her baptism the most appropriate name that could have been selected to describe her.

On coming to Towan, Rose had settled herself into her new quarters with perfect aptitude, had won her way to the heart of Mrs. Gaverock, whom, however, she bewildered, exercised a sort of daring authority over the squire, which he endured because it was not worth his trouble to resist, and treated Gerans as her groom and errand boy. She was good-natured and lively as long as she

had her own way; when-which was rarely-she was crossed, she pouted, and managed to make every one about her uncomfortable. She was not in the smallest degree shy. Brought up in the society of men, who flattered and made much of her, she preferred their company to that of women. But though she liked to be with men, and made much of by men, she was dimly conscious of an inarticulate, undefined craving for the companionship of a woman to whom she could empty her mind, of whom she could exact nothing but sympathy. Her mother had died too early for her to be even a reminiscence. On arriving at Towan she had made the acquaintance of Loveday Penhalligan, and had been drawn to her as she had been attracted by no other woman.

Loveday was an orphan, like herself; pretty, but of quite another order of beauty, with olive skin, dark hair, and large soft umber eyes. Loveday lived with her brother Dennis in a cottage, called Nantsillan, rented of the squire.

Dennis Penhalligan was a surgeon, a young man, who had come to the place about five years before, having bought the practice. Dennis was a poor man; his capital had not permitted of his purchasing any other than a very humble practice. He had spent his little fortune on his own education and on thus establishing himself. The neighbourhood was a three-sided one -one side being the sea-and was but sparsely inhabited.

Dennis Penhalligan was a tall, well-built man, with black hair, an olive complexion, and dark keen eyes. His poverty, the hardships he had undergone in elbowing his way in life, had taken the joy and elasticity from his spirits, and had given a bitterness to his mood unusual to one of his age. He was the intellectual superior of all his neighbours, and he held himself aloof from association with them, in cold and sour contempt of their narrowness of interests and pettiness of aim. His patients complained of callousness in his treatment of their sufferings. He did not administer to them that sympathy which they desired equally with medicine. A surgeon who has walked the hospitals looks on his patients as cases, not persons. But when he begins to practise for a fee, he finds that persons insist on being considered persons and not cases. They demand of their medical attendant that he shall have, or simulate (it matters nothing which), an individual interest in them. Every practitioner should place himself in the hands of an actor to qualify him for success in his professional career.