JANUARY 51 



and departure of a race. To understand the thing and appreciate it 

 fully it is necessary to take the registers of any given parish, and 

 to read them through from their beginnings about the year 1550. 

 At that beginning, in such cases as I have instanced, we shall 

 already find the family in possession, for here are entries of their 

 births, their marriages, their burials — nearly all of them make 

 these three formal appearances in that record which no one studies 

 once in a century. 



And so it goes on through the long generations, this tale of 

 the considerable dead — so important in their own day, looming 

 so large for a while upon the little world of the village which they 

 ruled, and now so utterly forgot that their bones are tossed about, 

 as I have seen happen, by the man from London who fits the hot- 

 water pipes in the parish church, unrecognised, uncared-for, and 

 unknown — till at length we come to the entries of the baptisms of 

 the past owners, still living, perhaps, but ' gone away, leaving no 

 address,' as they say on letters that follow us from forsaken lodg- 

 ings. The time of their race has come ; they and the soil that 

 bred them — yes, the very earth, chemically changed indeed, but 

 still the earth of which the bodies of those of them who survive are 

 built up — have been divorced for ever, unless indeed they creep, or 

 rather are carried, back to claim the hospitality of burial in some 

 ancestral vault, as those possessing a family grave have the right 

 to do. In this particular the villager is more fortunate than his 

 dispossessed and ancestral lord. Having nothing to lose, he loses 

 nothing, but from generation to generation lives on where his 

 fathers lived, earning his daily bread by the sweat of his daily 

 toil. Indeed, if all the truth were known, in the case of most 

 vanished families, doubtless the race, or some part of it, still 

 survives in him, for from the highest to the lowest, in past ages 

 at any rate, the blood of our English villagers was curiously 

 mixed. 



For the benefit of those unacquainted with the function I 

 will describe a rent audit of the local type. The ceremony begins 

 about twelve o'clock, when the agent takes his seat in a small room 



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