to do so, and making enough out of it to satisfy his large wants and their own narrow needs without working themselves to death.  But my grandfather was a shrewd man.  He perceived that cows and sheep produced more money by their meat and wool than peasants by their husbandry.  So he cleared the estate.  That is, he drove the peasants from their homes, as my father did afterwards in his Scotch deer forest.  Or, as his tombstone has it, he developed the resources of his country.  I don’t know what became of the peasants; he didn’t know, and, I presume, didn’t care.  I suppose the old ones went into the workhouse, and the young ones crowded the towns, and worked for men like my father in factories.  Their places were taken by cattle, which paid for their food so well that my grandfather, getting my father to take shares in the enterprise, hired laborers on the Manchester terms to cut that canal for him.  When it was made, he took toll upon it; and his heirs still take toll, and the sons of the navvies who dug it and of the engineer who designed it pay the toll when they have occasion to travel by it, or to purchase goods which have been conveyed along it.  I remember my grandfather well.  He was a well-bred man, and a perfect gentleman in his manners; but, on the whole, I think he was wickeder than my father, who, after all, was caught in the wheels of a vicious system, and had either to spoil others or be spoiled by them.  But my grandfather—­the old rascal!—­was in no such dilemma.  Master as he was of his bit of merry England, no man could have enslaved him, and he might at least have lived and let live.  My father followed his example in the matter of the deer forest, but that was the climax of his wickedness, whereas it was only the beginning of my grandfather’s.  Howbeit, whichever bears the palm, there they were, the types after which we all strive.”

“Not all, Sidney.  Not we two.  I hate tradespeople and country squires.  We belong to the artistic and cultured classes, and we can keep aloof from shopkeepers.”

“Living, meanwhile, at the rate of several thousand a year on rent and interest.  No, my dear, this is the way of those people who insist that when they are in heaven they shall be spared the recollection of such a place as hell, but are quite content that it shall exist outside their consciousness.  I respect my father more—­I mean I despise him less—­for doing his own sweating and filching than I do the sensitive sluggards and cowards who lent him their money to sweat and filch with, and asked no questions provided the interest was paid punctually.  And as to your friends the artists, they are the worst of all.”

“Oh, Sidney, you are determined not to be pleased.  Artists don’t keep factories.”