xxvi MEMOIR 



remorseful feeling ; for when the will was opened, there was not 

 found so much as the mention of his name. He was deeply in 

 debt ; in debt even to the estate of his deceiver, so that he had 

 to sell a piece of land to clear himself. ' My dear boy,' he said 

 to Charles, ' there will be nothing left for you. I am a ruined 

 man.' And here follows for me the strangest part of this story. 

 From the death of the treacherous aunt, Charles Jenkin senior 

 had still some nine years to live ; it was perhaps too late for 

 him to turn to saving, and perhaps his affairs were past resto- 

 ration. But his family at least had all this while to prepare ; 

 they were still young men, and knew what they had to look for 

 at their father's death ; and yet when that happened in Sep- 

 tember 1831, the heir was still apathetically waiting. Poor 

 Fleem- John, the days of his whips and spurs and Yeomanry dinners 



ing's were quite over ; and with that incredible softness of the Jenkin 



uncle 



John. nature, he settled down, for the rest of a long life, into something 



not far removed above a peasant. The mill farm at Stowting 

 had been saved out of the wreck ; and here he built himself a 

 house on the Mexican model, and made the two ends meet with 

 rustic thrift, gathering dung with his own hands upon the road 

 and not at all abashed at his employment. In dress, voice and 

 manner, he fell into mere country plainness ; lived without the 

 least care for appearances, the least regret for the past or dis- 

 contentment with the present ; and when he came to die, died 

 with Stoic cheerfulness, announcing that he had had a comfort- 

 able time and was yet well pleased to go. One would think there 

 was little active virtue to be inherited from such a race ; and 

 yet in this same voluntary peasant, the special gift of Fleeming 

 Jenkin was already half developed. The old man to the end 

 was perpetually inventing ; his strange, ill-spelled, unpunctuated 

 correspondence is full (when he does not drop into cookery re- 

 ceipts) of pumps, road engines, steam- diggers, steam-ploughs, 

 and steam-threshing machines ; and I have it on Fleeming's 

 word that what he did was full of ingenuity only, as if by some 

 cross destiny, useless. These disappointments he not only took 

 with imperturbable good humour, but rejoiced with a particular 

 relish over his nephew's success in the same field. * I glory in 



