He remained there all day, and, just before night, passed through the forest to another road, and in the early morning was driving quietly along a Canadian highway, surveying his “adopted country,” and assuming the character of a loyal subject of the good Queen of England.

CHAPTER XXX.

WHICH GIVES THE HISTORY OF AN ANNIVERSARY, PRESENTS A TABLEAU, AND DROPS THE CURTAIN.

Three months after Mr. Belcher’s escape, the great world hardly remembered that such a man as he had ever lived.  Other rascals took his place, and absorbed the public attention, having failed to learn—­what even their betters were slow to apprehend—­that every strong, active, bad man is systematically engaged in creating and shaping the instruments for his own destruction.  Men continued to be dazzled by their own success, until they could see neither the truth and right that lay along their way, nor the tragic end that awaited them.

The execution in satisfaction of the judgment obtained against Mr. Belcher was promptly issued and levied; claimants and creditors of various sorts took all that the execution left; Mrs. Belcher and her children went to their friends in the country; the Sevenoaks property was bought for Mr. Benedict, and a thousand lives were adjusted to the new circumstances; but narrative palls when its details are anticipated.  Let us pass them, regarding them simply as memories coming up—­sometimes faintly, sometimes freshly—­from the swiftly retiring years, and close the book, as we began it, with a picture.

Sevenoaks looks, in its main features, as it looked when the reader first saw it.  The river rolls through it with the old song that the dwellers upon its banks have heard through all these changing years.  The workmen and workwomen come and go in the mill, in their daily round of duty, as they did when Phipps, and the gray trotters, and the great proprietor were daily visions of the streets.  The little tailoress returns twice a year with her thrifty husband, to revisit her old friends; and she brings at last a little one, which she shows with great pride.  Sevenoaks has become a summer thoroughfare to the woods, where Jim receives the city-folk in incredible numbers.

We look in upon the village on a certain summer evening, at five years’ remove from the first occupation of the Belcher mansion by Mr. Benedict.  The mist above the falls cools the air and bathes the trees as it did when Robert Belcher looked upon it as the incense which rose to his lordly enterprise.  The nestling cottages, the busy shops, the fresh-looking spires, the distant woods, the more distant mountain, the old Seven Oaks upon the Western plateau and the beautiful residence behind them, are the same to-day that they were when we first looked upon them; but a new life and a new influence inform them all.  Nature holds her unvarying frame, but the life upon the canvas is what we paint from year to year.  The river sings to vice as it sings to virtue.  The birds carol the same, whether selfishness or love be listening.  The great mountains rejoice in the sun, or drape their brows in clouds, irrespective of the eyes that regard them.