The conversation he delighted in most might have been going on in any century since the Conquest.  Grant him his not unreasonable argument upon his property in game, he was a liberal landlord.  No tenants were forced to take his farms.  He dragged none by the collar.  He gave them liberty to go to Australia, Canada, the Americas, if they liked.  He asked in return to have the liberty to shoot on his own grounds, and rear the marks for his shot, treating the question of indemnification as a gentleman should.  Still there were grumbling tenants.  He swarmed with game, and, though he was liberal, his hares and his birds were immensely destructive:  computation could not fix the damage done by them.  Probably the farmers expected them not to eat.  ‘There are two parties to a bargain,’ said Everard, ’and one gets the worst of it.  But if he was never obliged to make it, where’s his right to complain?’ Men of sense rarely obtain satisfactory answers:  they are provoked to despise their kind.  But the poacher was another kind of vermin than the stupid tenant.  Everard did him the honour to hate him, and twice in a fray had he collared his ruffian, and subsequently sat in condemnation of the wretch:  for he who can attest a villany is best qualified to punish it.  Gangs from the metropolis found him too determined and alert for their sport.  It was the factiousness of here and there an unbroken young scoundrelly colt poacher of the neighbourhood, a born thief, a fellow damned in an inveterate taste for game, which gave him annoyance.  One night he took Master Nevil out with him, and they hunted down a couple of sinners that showed fight against odds.  Nevil attempted to beg them off because of their boldness.  ‘I don’t set my traps for nothing,’ said his uncle, silencing him.  But the boy reflected that his uncle was perpetually lamenting the cowed spirit of the common English-formerly such fresh and merry men!  He touched Rosamund Culling’s heart with his description of their attitudes when they stood resisting and bawling to the keepers, ’Come on we’ll die for it.’  They did not die.  Everard explained to the boy that he could have killed them, and was contented to have sent them to gaol for a few weeks.  Nevil gaped at the empty magnanimity which his uncle presented to him as a remarkably big morsel.  At the age of fourteen he was despatched to sea.

He went unwillingly; not so much from an objection to a naval life as from a wish, incomprehensible to grown men and boys, and especially to his cousin, Cecil Baskelett, that he might remain at school and learn.  ‘The fellow would like to be a parson!’ Everard said in disgust.  No parson had ever been known of in the Romfrey family, or in the Beauchamp.  A legend of a parson that had been a tutor in one of the Romfrey houses, and had talked and sung blandly to a damsel of the blood—­degenerate maid—­to receive a handsome trouncing for his pains, instead of the holy marriage-tie he aimed at, was the only