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The elder brother, the Squire, had been generally a dullish, goodish sort of man, doing his duty fairly well, fairly kind to his younger brothers and sisters, keeping up the ancestral house as well as he could on means not great enough for any splendour, and giving more or less a home to the scattered members of his family. The great advantage of those much abused laws of primogeniture, entail, or whatever else they may be which fix the succession in one member of a family, is this—that they are far more apt to keep up a central point, a family home, than any other arrangement yet discovered. When all share alike, no one has any particular claim upon the others, and ancestral homes, like all other primitive regulations for preserving the sacred nucleus of the family, cease to be.

The younger Prescott brothers went off to seek their fortunes in every generation; the elder always kept up the house. It depended upon his character, and perhaps still more on that of his wife, whether this home was or was not a kindly one, but still it was always there; a possible shelter in all circumstances, a perpetual court of appeal against the injustices of the world.