At a rather new church on the very top they halted, and went in to inspect the Morton memorials.  There they were, in dedicated corners.  ’Edmund and his wife Catherine’—­’Charles Edmund and his wife Florence’—­’Maurice Edmund and his wife Dorothy.’  Clara had set her foot down against ‘Stanley and his wife Clara’ being in the fourth; her soul was above ploughs, and she, of course, intended to be buried at Becket, as Clara, dowager Lady Freeland, for her efforts in regard to the land.  Felix, who had a tendency to note how things affected other people, watched Derek’s inspection of these memorials and marked that they excited in him no tendency to ribaldry.  The boy, indeed, could hardly be expected to see in them what Felix saw—­an epitome of the great, perhaps fatal, change that had befallen his native country; a record of the beginning of that far-back fever, whose course ran ever faster, which had emptied country into town and slowly, surely, changed the whole spirit of life.  When Edmund Moreton, about 1780, took the infection disseminated by the development of machinery, and left the farming of his acres to make money, that thing was done which they were all now talking about trying to undo, with their cries of:  “Back to the land!  Back to peace and sanity in the shade of the elms!  Back to the simple and patriarchal state of feeling which old documents disclose.  Back to a time before these little squashed heads and bodies and features jutted every which way; before there were long squashed streets of gray houses; long squashed chimneys emitting smoke-blight; long squashed rows of graves; and long squashed columns of the daily papers.  Back to well-fed countrymen who could not read, with Common rights, and a kindly feeling for old ‘Moretons,’ who had a kindly feeling for them!” Back to all that?  A dream!  Sirs!  A dream!  There was nothing for it now, but—­ progress!  Progress!  On with the dance!  Let engines rip, and the little, squash-headed fellows with them!  Commerce, literature, religion, science, politics, all taking a hand; what a glorious chance had money, ugliness, and ill will!  Such were the reflections of Felix before the brass tablet: 

“In loving memory of
Edmund Morton
and
his devoted wife
Catherine.

At rest in the Lord.  A.D., 1816.”

From the church they went about their proper business, to interview a Mr. Pogram, of the firm of Pogram & Collet, solicitors, in whose hands the interests of many citizens of Transham and the country round were almost securely deposited.  He occupied, curiously enough, the house where Edmund Morton himself had lived, conducting his works on the one hand and the squirearchy of the parish on the other.  Incorporated now into the line of a long, loose street, it still stood rather apart from its neighbors, behind some large shrubs and trees of the holmoak variety.