And now the tale is told, and all that for me remains to do is sit with folded hands beside that dear grey head before the blazing fire, and talk away the winter's day. And in the hot summer's evenings stroll, with that same dear trusting hand upon mine arm, that for sixty years hath been there, beneath the old oaks of dear Bradley House. And when your dear cousins, Harleston, and your Uncle Frederick and Aunt Mary—as ye do call them—come over to spend with us a quiet evening, we all do sit upon the great lawn and talk the setting sun into his rest.
And now but a word of the great Michael, which ye all do love so dearly. Mayhap ye never have heard the reason why we do not call him "Sir." It was at his own request that we did drop the distinction.
"Sure, yer honour," said he to me one day, "if ye playze, wouldst thou moind if Oi axed thee to not call me 'Sor'?"
"But for why, my good friend?"
"Uh! sure sor it doesn't sound roight to moy ears, and maketh me to fale a stranger to thee, sor. Playze, sor, give unto me back moy ould name and Oi'll fale more loike moysilf."
That, my dears, is the reason why the great man who hath ever lived with us, and carried ye all on his mighty shoulders, hath ever been known unto ye all as plain, old, faithful Michael.
And so, like the harmonious voices of a choir, we five are singing the last, sweet, trembling note. It is dying softly out; but with a tender, holy peacefulness.
THE END
NOTE.—Sir Walter Bradley's chronicle differs, in some parts, from the histories of the majority of the writers of his time. His most important contradictions of his contemporaries are:—