calling his little grand-daughter to him, and putting a handful of gold into her lap, just as if she had been a child of Crœsus.
Very abstemious himself, he loved to see his friends enjoy themselves. One Christmas his party numbered as many as a hundred persons. To have been born to unknown wealth, to have spent without a thought, to have allowed wasteful profusion to be the habit of his household, to have staved in hogsheads of wine and barrels of beer, and roasted oxen whole on every festive occasion; to have shared, in fact, with his neighbours all the good things God had given him, asking only in exchange that he should be lord paramount—that all should wear his colours, and shout "King and Church" till their throats were hoarse; and at last to have died leaving his estate beggared, the whole country-side debauched, and a name loved and enshrined in the hearts of the people as the best of landlords, and the only true gentleman of his race; such would in all probability have been William Huntington's career had he been born in one of the stately homes of England instead of in one of its miserable cots. Freely he had received, freely he gave. In William Huntington the Sussex peasant shows himself capable of a rude order of grandeur.
However, Huntington would never have risen to the point of being recognised as a type of the South Saxon peasant had not individuality been a marked feature in his character.
Having proclaimed from the housetops the wretchedness and disgrace of his early days, having bestowed on himself the title of S.S., as if it belonged alone to him, he now desired to set forth with equal prominence the honour and glory to which he had been raised. Not content, therefore, with merely appearing in decent garb, he wore the great shovel hat of a clergyman, and dubbed himself "the Doctor." Not content even with the grandeur of his carriage and pair, he actually hired two more horses, and drove about with regal pomp in a coach and four, a coachman and footman in livery, and a superb hammercloth, made of a tiger's skin with gilt claws.
Some may think he must have gone out of his mind. Nothing of the sort. We have only to reflect what had been the history of his life, how he had emerged from material misery, through spiritual darkness into spiritual light, and so to material honour,
