It would be useless to describe the sensations of my family when I divulged the news.  Near a fortnight had passed before I attempted to restrain their affliction; for premature consolation is but the remembrance of sorrow.  During this interval I determined to send my eldest son to London, and I accepted a small cure of fifteen pounds a year in a distant neighbourhood.

The first day’s journey brought us within thirty miles of our future retreat, and we put up at an obscure inn in a village by the way.  At the inn was a gentleman who, the landlord told me, had been so liberal in his charity that he had no money left to pay his reckoning.  I could not avoid expressing my concern at seeing a gentleman in such circumstances, and offered the stranger my purse.  “I take it with all my heart, sir,” replied he, “and am glad that my late oversight has shown me that there are still some men like you.”  The stranger’s conversation was so pleasing and instructive that we were rejoiced to hear that he was going the same way as ourselves.

The next morning we all set forward together.  Mr. Burchell and I lightened the fatigues of the road with philosophical disputes, and he also informed me to whom the different seats belonged that lay in our view.

“That, Dr. Primrose,” he said to me, pointing to a very magnificent house, “belongs to Mr. Thornhill, a young gentleman who enjoys a large fortune, though entirely dependent upon the will of his uncle, Sir William Thornhill.”

“What!” cried I, “is my young landlord, then, the nephew of one who is represented as a man of consummate benevolence?”

At this point we were alarmed by the cries of my family, and I perceived my youngest daughter in the midst of a rapid stream, and struggling with the torrent; she must have certainly perished had not my companion instantly plunged in to her relief.  Her gratitude may be more readily imagined than described; she thanked her deliverer more with looks than words.  Soon afterwards Mr. Burchell took leave of us, and we pursued our journey to the place of our retreat.

II.—­The Squire

At a small distance from our habitation was a seat overshaded by a hedge of hawthorn and honeysuckle.  Here, when the weather was fine, and our labour soon finished, we usually sat together to enjoy an extensive landscape in the calm of the evening.  On an afternoon about the beginning of autumn, when I had drawn out my family to the seat, dogs and horsemen swept past us with great swiftness.  After them a young gentleman, of a more genteel appearance than the rest, came forward, and, instead of pursuing the chase, stopped short, and approached us with a careless, superior air.  He let us know that his name was Thornhill, and that he was the owner of the estate that lay around us.  As his address, though confident, was easy, we soon became more familiar; and the whole family seemed earnest to please him.