There is something truly pathetic as well as droll in the anxiety of every true American to prove himself or herself an offshoot from some old British root of honour or nobility.  It would be cruel to laugh at this instinct, for after all it is only the passionate longing of the Prodigal Son who, having eaten of the husks that the swine did eat, experienced such an indigestion at last, that he said ‘I will arise and go to my father.’  And it is quite possible that an aspiring Trans-Atlantic millionaire yearning for descent more than dollars, would have managed to find tracks of a Mayflower pedigree in St. Rest, a place of such antiquity as to be able to boast a chivalric ‘roll of honour’ once kept in the private museum at Badsworth Hall before the Badsworth family became extinct, but now, thanks to Walden, rescued from the modern clutch of the Hall’s present proprietor, Sir Morton Pippitt, and carefully preserved in an iron box locked up in the church, along with other documents of value belonging to the neighbourhood.  On this were inscribed the names of such English gentlemen once resident in the district, who had held certain possessions in France at the accession of Henry II. in 1154.  Besides the ‘roll of honour’ there were other valuable records having to do with the Anglo-French campaigns in the time of King John, and much concerning those persons of St. Rest and Riversford who took part in the Wars of the Barons.

Whatever there was of curious or interesting matter respecting the village and its surroundings had been patiently ferreted out by John Walden, who had purchased the living partly because he knew it to be a veritable mine for antiquarian research, and one likely to afford him inexhaustible occupation and delight.  But there were, of course, other reasons for his settling down in so remote a spot far from the busy haunts of men,—­reasons which, to his own mind, were perfectly natural and simple, though on account of his innate habit of reticence, and disinclination to explain his motives to others, they were by some supposed to be mysterious.  In his youth he had been one of the most brilliant and promising of University scholars, and all those who had assisted to fit him for his career in the Church, had expected great things of him.  Some said he would be a Bishop before he was thirty; others considered that he would probably content himself with being the most intellectual and incisive preacher of his time.  But he turned out to be neither one nor the other.  A certain Henry Arthur Brent, his fellow student at College and five years his senior, had, with apparent ease, outstripped him in the race for honour, though lacking in all such exceptional slowly off towards the vegetable garden where his ‘under gardeners’ as he called three or four sturdy village lads employed to dig and hoe, constantly required his supervision.

Meanwhile Walden, leaving his own grounds, entered the churchyard, walking with softly reverent step among the little green mounds of earth, under which kind eyes were closed, and warm hearts lay cold, till, reaching the porched entrance of the church itself, he paused, brought to a halt by the sound of voices which were pitched rather too loud for propriety, considering the sacredness of the surroundings.