than with the piety found on the high-backed seats in the Quaker Meeting-
house. The name given her on the register of death was Mercy Claridge,
and a line beneath said that she was the daughter of Luke Claridge, that
her age at passing was nineteen years, and that "her soul was with the
Lord."

Another whose life had given pages to the village history was one of
noble birth, the Earl of Eglington. He had died twenty years after the
time when Luke Claridge, against the then custom of the Quakers, set up a
tombstone to Mercy Claridge's memory behind the Meeting-house. Only
thrice in those twenty years had he slept in a room of the Cloistered
House. One of those occasions was the day on which Luke Claridge put up
the grey stone in the graveyard, three years after his daughter's death.
On the night of that day these two men met face to face in the garden of
the Cloistered House. It was said by a passer-by, who had involuntarily
overheard, that Luke Claridge had used harsh and profane words to Lord
Eglington, though he had no inkling of the subject of the bitter talk.
He supposed, however, that Luke had gone to reprove the other for a
wasteful and wandering existence; for desertion of that Quaker religion
to which his grandfather, the third Earl of Eglington, had turned in the
second half of his life, never visiting his estates in Ireland, and
residing here among his new friends to his last day. This listener--John
Fairley was his name--kept his own counsel. On two other occasions had
Lord Eglington visited the Cloistered House in the years that passed, and
remained many months. Once he brought his wife and child. The former
was a cold, blue-eyed Saxon of an old family, who smiled distantly upon
the Quaker village; the latter, a round-headed, warm-faced youth, with a
bold, menacing eye, who probed into this and that, rushed here and there
as did his father; now built a miniature mill; now experimented at some
peril in the laboratory which had been arranged in the Cloistered House