However, he felt uneasy during the remainder of the night, no less on account of the Duke’s personal condition than because of that which was imminent next day.  Early in the morning he called at Shakeforest Towers.  The blinds were down, and there was something singular upon the porter’s face when he opened the door.  The steward inquired for the Duke.

The man’s voice was subdued as he replied:  ’Sir, I am sorry to say that his Grace is dead!  He left his room some time in the night, and wandered about nobody knows where.  On returning to the upper floor he lost his balance and fell downstairs.’

The steward told the tale of the Down before the Vicar had spoken.  Mills had always intended to do so after the death of the Duke.  The consequences to himself he underwent cheerfully; but his life was not prolonged.  He died, a farmer at the Cape, when still somewhat under forty-nine years of age.

The splendid Marlbury breeding flock is as renowned as ever, and, to the eye, seems the same in every particular that it was in earlier times; but the animals which composed it on the occasion of the events gathered from the Justice are divided by many ovine generations from its members now.  Lambing Corner has long since ceased to be used for lambing purposes, though the name still lingers on as the appellation of the spot.  This abandonment of site may be partly owing to the removal of the high furze bushes which lent such convenient shelter at that date.  Partly, too, it may be due to another circumstance.  For it is said by present shepherds in that district that during the nights of Christmas week flitting shapes are seen in the open space around the trilithon, together with the gleam of a weapon, and the shadow of a man dragging a burden into the hollow.  But of these things there is no certain testimony.

Christmas 1881.

A COMMITTEE-MAN OF ‘THE TERROR’

We had been talking of the Georgian glories of our old-fashioned watering-place, which now, with its substantial russet-red and dun brick buildings in the style of the year eighteen hundred, looks like one side of a Soho or Bloomsbury Street transported to the shore, and draws a smile from the modern tourist who has no eye for solidity of build.  The writer, quite a youth, was present merely as a listener.  The conversation proceeded from general subjects to particular, until old Mrs. H—­, whose memory was as perfect at eighty as it had ever been in her life, interested us all by the obvious fidelity with which she repeated a story many times related to her by her mother when our aged friend was a girl—­a domestic drama much affecting the life of an acquaintance of her said parent, one Mademoiselle V—­, a teacher of French.  The incidents occurred in the town during the heyday of its fortunes, at the time of our brief peace with France in 1802-3.

’I wrote it down in the shape of a story some years ago, just after my mother’s death,’ said Mrs. H—.  ‘It is locked up in my desk there now.’