By this time, Mrs. Kinloch’s son, Hugh Branning, who had been to the stable with the horse and carriage, came whistling through the yard, and cutting off weeds or twigs along the path with sharp cuts of his whip.

“Which way is the wind now?” said he, as he approached; “the governor asleep, Mildred crying, and you scolding, mother?” In a moment, however, the sight of the ghastly face transfixed the thoughtless youth, as it had done his mother; and, dropping his whip, he stood silent, awe-struck, in the presence of the dead.

“Hugh,” said Mrs. Kinloch, speaking in a very quiet tone, “go and tell Squire Clamp to come over here.”

In a few minutes the dead body was carried into the house by George, the Asiatic servant, aided by a villager who happened to pass by.  Squire Clamp, the lawyer of the town, came and had a conference with Mrs. Kinloch respecting the funeral.  Neighbors came to offer sympathy, and aid, if need should be.  Then the house was put in order, and crape hung on the door-handle.  The family were alone with their dead.

On the village green the boys were playing a grand game of “round ball,” for it was a half-holiday.  The clear, silvery tones of the bell were heard, and we stopped to listen.  Was it a fire?  No, the ringing was not vehement enough.  A meeting of the church?  In a moment we should know.  As the bell ceased, we looked up to the white taper spire to catch the next sound.  One stroke.  It was a death, then,—­and of a man.  We listened for the age tolled from the belfry.  Fifty-five.  Who had departed?  The sexton crossed the green on his way to the shop to make the coffin, and informed us.  Our bats and balls had lost their interest for us; we did not even ask our tally-man, who cut notches for us on a stick, how the game stood.  For Squire Walter Kinloch was the most considerable man in our village of Innisfield.  Without being highly educated, he was a man of reading and intelligence.  In early life he had amassed a fortune in the China trade, and with it he had brought back a deeply bronzed complexion, a scar from the creese of a Malay pirate, and the easy manners which travel always gives to observant and sensible men.  But his rather stately carriage produced no envy or ill-will among his humbler neighbors, for his superiority was never questioned.  Men bowed to him with honest good-will, and boys, who had been flogged at school for confounding Congo and Coromandel, and putting Borneo in the Bight of Benin, made an awkward obeisance and stared wonderingly, as they met the man who had actually sailed round the world, and had, in his own person, illustrated the experiment of walking with his head downwards among the antipodes.  His house had no rival in the country round, and his garden was considered a miracle of art, having, in popular belief, all the fruits, flowers, and shrubs that had been known from the days of Solomon to those of Linnaeus.  Prodigious stories were told of his hoard of gold,