long as possible in that last room he began unlocking and
flinging open all the old oak cupboards and presses. Glancing
round at the long array of empty shelves, I noticed a small
brown-paper parcel, thick with dust, in a corner, and as it
was the only movable thing I had seen in that vacant house I
asked him what the parcel contained. Books, he replied--they
had been left as of no value when the house was cleared of
furniture. As I wished to see the books he undid the parcel;
it contained forty copies of a small quarto-shaped book of
sonnets, with the late squire's name as author on the title
page. I read a sonnet, and told him I should like to read
them all. "You can have a copy, of course," he exclaimed.
"Put it in your pocket and keep it." When I asked him if he
had any right to give one away he laughed and said that if any
one had thought the whole parcel worth twopence it would not
have been left behind. He was quite right; a cracked dinner
--plate or a saucepan with a hole in it or an earthenware
teapot with a broken spout would not have been left, but the
line was drawn at a book of sonnets by the late squire.
Nobody wanted it, and so without more qualms I put it in my
pocket, and have it before me now, opened at page 63, on which
appears, without a headline, the sonnet I first read, and
which I quote:--

How beautiful are birds, of God's sweet air
Free denizens; no ugly earthly spot
Their boundless happiness doth seem to blot.
The swallow, swiftly flying here and there,
Can it be true that dreary household care
Doth goad her to incessant flight?