pollard poplars, up to Mr. Caldigate’s house.  Round the house there are meadows, and a large old-fashioned kitchen garden, and a small dark flower-garden, with clipt hedges and straight walks, quite in the old fashion.  The house itself is dark, picturesque, well-built, low, and uncomfortable.  Part of it is as old as the time of Charles II., and part dates from Queen Anne.  Something was added at a later date,—­perhaps early in the Georges; but it was all done with good materials, and no stint of labour.  Shoddy had not been received among building materials when any portion of Folking was erected.  But then neither had modern ideas of comfort become in vogue.  Just behind the kitchen-garden a great cross ditch, called Foul-water Drain, runs, or rather creeps, down to the Wash, looking on that side as though it had been made to act as a moat to the house; and on the other side of the drain there is Twopenny Drove, at the end of which Twopenny Ferry leads to Twopenny Hall, a farmhouse across the Wash belonging to Mr. Caldigate.  The fields around are all square and all flat, all mostly arable, and are often so deep in mud that a stranger wonders that a plough should be able to be dragged through the soil.  The farming is, however, good of its kind, and the ploughing is mostly done by steam.

Such is and has been for some years the house at Folking in which Mr. Caldigate has lived quite alone.  For five years after his wife’s death he had only on rare occasions received visitors there.  Twice his brother had come to Folking, and had brought a son with him.  The brother had been a fellow of a college at Cambridge, and had taken a living, and married late in life.  The living was far away in Dorsetshire, and the son, at the time of these visits, was being educated at a private school.  Twice they had both been at Folking together, and the uncle had, in his silent way, liked the boy.  The lad had preferred, or had pretended to prefer, books to rats; had understood or seemed to understand, something of the advantages of cheap food for the people, and had been commended by the father for general good conduct.  But when they had last taken their departure from Folking, no one had entertained any idea of any peculiar relations between the nephew and the uncle.  It was not till a year or two more had run by, that Mr. Daniel Caldigate thought of making his nephew George the heir to the property.

The property indeed was entailed upon John, as it had been entailed upon John’s father.  There were many institutions of his country which Mr. Caldigate hated with almost an inhuman hatred; but there were none more odious to him than that of entails, which institution he was wont to prove by many arguments to be the source of all the ignorance and all the poverty and all the troubles by which his country was inflicted.  He had got his own property by an entail, and certainly never would have had an acre had his father been able to consume more than a life-interest.