Brand set his teeth, ceased to spend money, and did his best to earn it.  But he was a stupid man, and the leading-strings in which his life had been held up to middle age had enfeebled such natural powers as he possessed.  His knowledge was old-fashioned, his methods slovenly; and his wife, as harmless as himself, but no cleverer, could do nothing to help him.  By dint, however, of living and working hard he got through two or three years, and might just have escaped his fate—­for his creditors, at that stage, were all ready to give him time—­had not ill-fortune thrown him across the path of Edmund Melrose.  The next farm to his belonged to the Threlfall estate.  Melrose’s methods as a landlord had thrown out one tenant after another, till he could do nothing but put in a bailiff and work it himself.  The bailiff was incompetent, and a herd of cattle made their way one morning through a broken fence that no one had troubled to mend, and did serious damage to Brand’s standing crops.  Melrose was asked to compensate, and flatly declined.  The fence was no doubt his; but he claimed that it had been broken by one of Brand’s men.  Hence the accident.  The statement was false, and the evidence supporting it corrupt.  Moreover the whole business was only the last of a series of unneighbourly acts on the part both of the bailiff and landowner, and a sudden fury blazed up in Brand’s slow mind.  He took his claim to the county court and won his case; the judge allowing himself a sharp sentence or two on the management of the Threlfall property.  Brand spent part of his compensation money in entertaining a group of friends at a Pengarth public.  But that was the last of his triumph.  Thenceforward things went mysteriously wrong with him.  His creditors, first one, then all, began to tighten their pressure on him; and presently the bank manager—­the Jove of Brand’s little world—­passed abruptly from civility or indulgence, to a peremptory reminder that debts were meant to be paid.  A fresh bill of sale on furniture and stock staved off disaster for a time.  But a bad season brought it once more a long step nearer, and the bank, however urgently appealed to, showed itself adamant, not only as to any further advance, but as to any postponement of their own claim.  Various desperate expedients only made matters worse, and after a few more wretched months during which his farm deteriorated, and his business went still further to wreck, owing largely to his own distress of mind, Brand threw up the sponge.  He sold his small remaining interest in his farm, which did not even suffice to pay his debts, and went out of it a bankrupt and broken man, prematurely aged.  A neighbouring squire, indignant with what was commonly supposed to be the secret influences at work in the affair, offered him the post of bailiff in a vacant farm; and he and his family migrated to the new-built cottage on the Ullswater road.