let their house and moved into Gloucestershire.  Here a certain measure of happiness seemed to return to him.  He made a new friend, as the Diary relates, in the person of the Squire of the village, a man who, though an invalid, had a strong and almost mystical hold upon life.  Here he began to interest himself in the people of the place, and tried all sorts of education and social experiments.  But his wife fell ill, and died very suddenly; and, not long after, his daughter died too.  He was for a time almost wholly broken down.  I went abroad with him at his request for a few weeks, but I was myself obliged to return to England to my professional duties.  I can only say that I did not expect ever to see him again.  He was like a man, the spring of whose life was broken; but at the same time he bore himself with a patience and a gentleness that fairly astonished me.  We were together day by day and hour by hour.  He made no complaint, and he used to force himself, with what sad effort was only too plain, to converse on all sorts of topics.  Some time after he drifted back to England; but at first he appeared to be in a very listless and dejected state.  Then there arrived, almost suddenly, it seemed to me, a change.  He had made the sacrifice; he had accepted the situation.  There came to him a serenity which was only like his old serenity from the fact that it seemed entirely unaffected; but it was based, I felt, on a very different view of life.  He was now content to wait and to believe.  It was at this time that the Squire died; and not long afterwards, the Squire’s niece, a woman of great strength and simplicity of character, married a clergyman to whom she had been long attached, both being middle-aged people; and the living soon afterwards falling vacant, her husband accepted it, and the newly-married pair moved into the Rectory; while my friend, who had been named as the Squire’s ultimate heir, a life-interest in the property being secured to the niece, went into the Hall.  Shortly afterwards he adopted a nephew—­his sister’s son—­who, with the consent of all concerned, was brought up as the heir to the estate, and is its present proprietor.

My friend lived some fifteen years after that, a quiet, active, and obviously contented life.  I was a frequent guest at the Hall, and I am sure that I never saw a more attached circle.  My friend became a magistrate, and he did a good deal of county business; but his main interest was in the place, where he was the trusted friend and counsellor of every household in the parish.  He took a great deal of active exercise in the open air; he read much.  He taught his nephew, whom he did not send to school.  He regained, in fuller measure than ever, his old delightful charm of conversation, and his humour, which had always been predominant in him, took on a deeper and a richer tinge; but whereas in old days he had been brilliant and epigrammatic, he was now rather poetical and suggestive; and whereas he had formerly been reticent about his