Edwards had been a tenant farmer where his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had lived before him. The rapacity of a land steward, heavy agricultural losses, and finally the arrival of a press-gang had reduced him to misery. By paying a certain sum of money he had been accepted by the press-gang instead of his son, and now old Edwards was returning home invalided from the army.
When they had arrived within a little way of the village they journeyed to, Harley stopped short and looked steadfastly on the mouldering walls of a ruined house that stood by the roadside.
"What do I see?" he cried. "Silent, unroofed, and desolate! That was the very school where I was boarded when you were at South Hill; 'tis but a twelve-month since I saw it standing and its benches filled with cherubs. That opposite side of the road was the green on which they sported; see, it is now ploughed up!"
Just then a woman passed them on the road, who, in reply to Harley, told them the squire had pulled the school-house down because it stood in the way of his prospects.
"If you want anything with the school-mistress, sir," said the woman. "I can show you the way to her house."
They followed her to the door of a snug habitation, where sat an elderly woman with a boy and a girl before her, each of whom held a supper of bread and milk in their hands.
"They are poor orphans," the school-mistress said, when Harley addressed her, "put under my care by the parish, and more promising children I never saw. Their father, sir, was a farmer here in the neighbourhood, and a sober, industrious man he was; but nobody can help misfortunes. What with bad crops and bad debts, his affairs went to wreck, and both he and his wife died of broken hearts. And a sweet couple they were, sir. There was not a properer man to look on in the county than John Edwards, and so, indeed, were all the Edwardses of South Hill."
"Edwards! South Hill!" said the old soldier, in a languid voice, and fell back in the arms of the astonished Harley.
He soon recovered, and folding his orphan grandchildren in his arms, cried, "My poor Jack, art thou gone--"
"My dear old man," said Harley, "Providence has sent you to relieve them. It will bless me if I can be the means of assisting you."