in the divine right of talent wherever it might be found to assert a claim of equality with those who were better born.  The women in the country-side were shy of her; for the men she could not possibly care, and no doubt she must at times have got rather weary of her heavy husband with his one outlook towards the universal in the person of George James Fox, and the Whig policy of 1802.  I am under some disadvantage in telling this part of my story, because I was far away from home, and only knew afterwards at second hand what the course of events had been; but I learned them from one who was intimately concerned, and I do not think I can be mistaken on any essential point.  I imagine that by this time Mrs. Butts must have become changed into what she was in later years.  She had grown older since she and I had parted; she had seen trouble; her child had been born, and although she was not exactly estranged from Clem, for neither he nor she would have admitted any coolness, she had learned that she was nothing specially to him.  I have often noticed what an imperceptible touch, what a slight shifting in the balance of opposing forces, will alter the character.  I have observed a woman, for example, essentially the same at twenty and thirty—­who is there who is not always essentially the same?—­and yet, what was a defect at twenty, has become transformed and transfigured into a benignant virtue at thirty; translating the whole nature from the human to the divine.  Some slight depression has been wrought here, and some slight lift has been given there, and beauty and order have miraculously emerged from what was chaotic.  The same thing may continually be noticed in the hereditary transmission of qualities.  The redeeming virtue of the father palpably present in the son becomes his curse, through a faint diminution of the strength of the check which caused that virtue to be the father’s salvation.  The propensity, too, which is a man’s evil genius, and leads him to madness and utter ruin, gives vivid reality to all his words and thoughts, and becomes all his strength, if by divine assistance it can just be subdued and prevented from rising in victorious insurrection.  But this is a digression, useful, however, in its way, because it will explain Mrs. Butts when we come a little nearer to her in the future.

For a time Clem’s visits to the squire’s house always took place when the squire was at home, but an amateur concert was to be arranged in which Clem was to take part together with the squire’s lady.  Clem consequently was obliged to go to the Hall for the purpose of practising, and so it came to pass that he was there at unusual hours and when the master was afield.  These morning and afternoon calls did not cease when the concert was over.  Clem’s wife did not know anything about them, and, if she noticed his frequent absence, she was met with an excuse.  Perhaps the worst, or almost the worst effect of relationships which