Mr. Caldigate was a country squire with a moderate income, living in a moderate house called Folking, in the parish of Utterden, about ten miles from Cambridge.  Here he owned nearly the entire parish, and some portion of Netherden, which lay next to it, having the reputation of an income of L3,000 a-year.  It probably amounted to about two-thirds of that.  Early in life he had been a very poor man, owing to the improvidence of his father; but he had soon quarrelled with his father,—­as he had with almost everyone else,—­and had for some ten years earned his own bread in the metropolis among the magazines and newspapers.  Then, when his father died, the property was his own, with such encumbrances as the old squire had been able to impose upon it.  Daniel Caldigate had married when he was a poor man, but did not go to Folking to live till the estate was clear, at which time he was forty years old.  When he was endeavouring to inculcate good Liberal principles into that son of his, who was burning the while to get off to a battle of rats among the corn-stacks, he was not yet fifty.  There might therefore be some time left to him for the promised joys of companionship if he could only convince the boy that politics were better than rats.

But he did not long make himself any such promise.  It seemed to him that his son’s mind was of a nature very different from his own; and much like to that of his grandfather.  The lad could be awakened to no enthusiasm in the abuse of Conservative leaders.  And those Babingtons were such fools!  He despised the whole race of them,—­especially those thick-legged, romping, cherry-cheeked damsels, of whom, no doubt, his son would marry one.  They were all of the earth earthy, without an idea among them.  And yet he did not dare to forbid his son to go to the house, lest people should say of him that his sternness was unendurable.

Folking is not a place having many attractions of its own, beyond the rats.  It lies in the middle of the Cambridgeshire fens, between St. Ives, Cambridge, and Ely.  In the two parishes of Utterden and Netherden there is no rise of ground which can by any stretch of complaisance be called a hill.  The property is bisected by an immense straight dike, which is called the Middle Wash, and which is so sluggish, so straight, so ugly, and so deep, as to impress the mind of a stranger with the ideas of suicide.  And there are straight roads and straight dikes, with ugly names on all sides, and passages through the country called droves, also with ugly appellations of their own, which certainly are not worthy of the name of roads.  The Folking Causeway possesses a bridge across the Wash, and is said to be the remains of an old Roman Way which ran in a perfectly direct line from St. Neots to Ely.  When you have crossed the bridge going northward,—­or north-westward,—­there is a lodge at your right hand, and a private road running, as straight as a line can be drawn, through