Captain Jabez Huxham was well known, and his eccentricity³ in the matter of planting Bleacres with yearly corn had been much commented upon. In Napoleonic times the fertile marsh farms had been golden with grain, but of late years, owing to Russian and American competition, little had been sown. Huxham, as the rustics⁴ argued, could not have got even moderate prices for its crops, so it puzzled one and all why he persisted in his unprofitable venture. But there would be no more sowing at Bleacres now, for the captain himself was about to be put under the earth. "And a grand funeral he'll have," said the rustics, morbidly⁵ alive to the importance of the grim event. For thirty years no crime of this magnitude had been committed in the neighbourhood, and the violent death of Huxham provided these bovine⁶ creatures with a new thrill.

 

Meanwhile the policeman, Dutton by name, had proceeded to Bleacres, followed—when the news became more widely known—by a large and curious throng⁷. For that day and for the following days, until Huxham's body was buried, Bleacres could no longer be called the solitary⁸ farm, in one sense of the word. But the inherent respect of the agriculturist for growing crops kept the individual members of the crowd, male and female, to the narrow path which led from the boundary channel to the front door of the Manor-house. When

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