an entail was not in accordance with the peculiarities of the Dale mind.  It was necessary to the Dale religion that each squire should have the power of wasting the acres of Allington,—­and that he should abstain from wasting them.  I remember to have dined at a house, the whole glory and fortune of which depended on the safety of a glass goblet.  We all know the story.  If the luck of Edenhall should be shattered, the doom of the family would be sealed.  Nevertheless I was bidden to drink out of the fatal glass, as were all guests in that house.  It would not have contented the chivalrous mind of the master to protect his doom by lock and key and padded chest.  And so it was with the Dales of Allington.  To them an entail would have been a lock and key and a padded chest; but the old chivalry of their house denied to them the use of such protection.

I have spoken something slightingly of the acquirements and doings of the family; and indeed their acquirements had been few and their doings little.  At Allington, Dale of Allington had always been known as a king.  At Guestwick, the neighbouring market town, he was a great man—­to be seen frequently on Saturdays, standing in the market-place, and laying down the law as to barley and oxen among men who knew usually more about barley and oxen than did he.  At Hamersham, the assize town, he was generally in some repute, being a constant grand juror for the county, and a man who paid his way.  But even at Hamersham the glory of the Dales had, at most periods, begun to pale, for they had seldom been widely conspicuous in the county, and had earned no great reputation by their knowledge of jurisprudence in the grand jury room.  Beyond Hamersham their fame had not spread itself.

They had been men generally built in the same mould, inheriting each from his father the same virtues and the same vices,—­men who would have lived, each, as his father had lived before him, had not the new ways of the world gradually drawn away with them, by an invisible magnetism, the upcoming Dale of the day,—­not indeed in any case so moving him as to bring him up to the spirit of the age in which he lived, but dragging him forward to a line in advance of that on which his father had trodden.  They had been obstinate men; believing much in themselves; just according to their ideas of justice; hard to their tenants but not known to be hard even by the tenants themselves, for the rules followed had ever been the rules on the Allington estate; imperious to their wives and children, but imperious within bounds, so that no Mrs Dale had fled from her lord’s roof, and no loud scandals had existed between father and sons; exacting in their ideas as to money, expecting that they were to receive much and to give little, and yet not thought to be mean, for they paid their way, and gave money in parish charity and in county charity.  They had ever been steady supporters of the Church, graciously receiving into their parish such new vicars as, from time to time, were sent to them from King’s College, Cambridge, to which establishment the gift of the living belonged,—­but, nevertheless, the Dales had ever carried on some unpronounced warfare against the clergyman, so that the intercourse between the lay family and the clerical had seldom been in all respects pleasant.