128 Saddle and Sirloin. 



flowed the Bywell village to such an extent, that the 

 Fenwick hunters had to be stabled in " The Black 

 Church ; " and it not only drowned a huntsman who 



He did not deem that even the poorest were "born just to be handled 

 by those above them like i/. notes." It was the feeling that "John 

 Grey is a just man" which was the secret of his power. The desire to 

 help eveiy one to the utmost was another great feature in him. During 

 the cattle plague no magistrate was more active ; and although he was 

 past eighty, he would attend every sale, however small, within reach of 

 his home, so that he might spare the buyers the trouble of coming to 

 him to get the papers signed. His powers and his bodily strength 

 seemed unimpaired to the last, although, as he would say, his children 

 and grandchildren, by their affectionate thought for his comforts, whe- 

 her at home or when he went to spend the Christmas at Millfield, 

 would " try to make an old man of me." That task would have been 

 above their hands, with such a tough, square-jawed borderer to deal 

 with. The lecture on poetry the year before he died, beginning as it 

 did with Chaucer and the 107th Psalm, and dealing largely in Sir 

 Walter Scott, the poet of "Teviot's bard and hero land," near which 

 his lot had been cast, was given almost entirely from memory. His 

 bodily force had abated as little as his mental, and when his son would 

 insist, overnight, on sending his luggage down to the railway for him, 

 the sturdy octogenarian rose an hour earlier, packed his big portmanteau, 

 and carried it on his shoulder half a mile to the station. 



In him there was hardly even that "gentle decay" which precedes 

 death. He had a slight ailment, and to his daughter's tender eye there 

 might be an unusual solemnity of manner when he read family prayers 

 on his last night on earth, but still nothing to cause alarm. She ex- 

 changed a few words with him in the morning. " My wants are few, 

 very few," were the last he spoke ; and when she next saw him he was 

 dead, seated on the stairs with "his forefinger raised, as if to enjoin 

 silence, or as if he heard some one calling him. " And so every scene 

 in his life, from dawn to sunset, from sunset to the close, is touched, in 

 his daughter's memoir of him, with the same bold and yet tender hand. 

 The last of all was on that wild Saturday, before his funeral, when, as in 

 Tennyson's "Dead Earl," "the wind was howling through turret and 

 tree," the very window-panes broken with a crash, the glass shivered 

 about the floor, and the white sheet which had been thrown over the 

 corpse blown rudely away. Sunday came in calm and clear, and 

 hardly stirred a leaf of the bright, shining evergreen with which daugh- 

 ters' hands then wreathed his coffin. "He looked so grand when he 

 was dead," with that union of tenderness and strength in the whole out- 

 line of his head and face which was the key to his successful manhood 

 and his honoured old age. He has gone to his rest, but the impress of 

 his practical knowledge and broad aims will be seen and remembered 

 for many a long year in the " Sweet Glendale" of his earlier days, and 

 the rich vale of the Tyne. 



