Only
the walnuts and the great oaks, some of them pollards of a thousand
years of age, remained stark and stern in their winter dress.
Alan was in a reflective mood and involuntarily began to wonder how many
of his forefathers had stood in that same spot upon such April mornings
and looked out upon those identical trees wakening in the breath of
spring. Only the trees and the landscape knew, those trees which had
seen every one of them borne to baptism, to bridal and to burial. The
men and women themselves were forgotten. Their portraits, each in the
garb of his or her generation, hung here and there upon the walls of the
ancient house which once they had owned or inhabited, but who remembered
anything of them to-day? In many cases their names even were lost, for
believing that they, so important in their time, could never sink into
oblivion, they had not thought it necessary to record them upon their
pictures.
And now the thing was coming to an end. Unless in this way or in that
he could save it, what remained of the old place, for the outlying lands
had long since been sold, must go to the hammer and become the property
of some pushing and successful person who desired to found a family, and
perhaps in days to be would claim these very pictures that hung upon the
walls as those of his own ancestors, declaring that he had brought in
the estate because he was a relative of the ancient and ruined race.
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