My Uncle Grafton came to Dr. Hilliard’s funeral, choosing this opportunity to become reconciled to my grandfather, who he feared had not much longer to live.  Albeit Mr. Carvel was as stout and hale as ever.  None of the mourners at the doctor’s grave showed more sorrow than did Grafton.  A thousand remembrances of the good old man returned to him, and I heard him telling Mr. Carroll and some other gentlemen, with much emotion, how he had loved his reverend preceptor, from whom he had learned nothing but what was good.  “How fortunate are you, Richard,” he once said, “to have had such a spiritual and intellectual teacher in your youth.  Would that Philip might have learned from such a one.  And I trust you can say, my lad, that you have made the best of your advantages, though I fear you are of a wild nature, as your father was before you.”  And my uncle sighed and crossed his hands behind his back.  “’Tis perhaps better that poor John is in his grave,” he said.  Grafton had a word and a smile for every one about the old place, but little else, being, as he said, but a younger son and a poor man.  I was near to forgetting the shilling he gave Scipio.  ’Twas not so unostentatiously done but that Mr. Carvel and I marked it.  And afterwards I made Scipio give me the coin, replacing it with another, and flung it as far into the river as ever I could throw.

As was but proper to show his sorrow at the death of the old chaplain he had loved so much, Grafton came to the Hall drest entirely in black.  He would have had his lady and Philip, a lad near my own age, clad likewise in sombre colours.  But my Aunt Caroline would none of them, holding it to be the right of her sex to dress as became its charms.  Her silks and laces went but ill with the low estate my uncle claimed for his purse, and Master Philip’s wardrobe was twice the size of mine.  And the family travelled in a coach as grand as Mr. Carvel’s own, with panels wreathed in flowers and a footman and outrider in livery, from which my aunt descended like a duchess.  She embraced my grandfather with much warmth, and kissed me effusively on both cheeks.

“And this is dear Richard?” she cried.  “Philip, come at once and greet your cousin.  He has not the look of the Carvels,” she continued volubly, “but more resembles his mother, as I recall her.”

“Indeed, madam,” my grandfather answered somewhat testily, “he has the Carvel nose and mouth, though his chin is more pronounced.  He has Elizabeth’s eyes.”

But my aunt was a woman who flew from one subject to another, and she had already ceased to think of me.  She was in the hall.  “The dear old home?” she cries, though she had been in it but once before, regarding lovingly each object as her eye rested upon it, nay, caressingly when she came to the great punch-bowl and the carved mahogany dresser, and the Peter Lely over the broad fireplace.  “What memories they must bring to your mind, my dear,” she remarks to her husband. “’Tis