He died very suddenly--intestate, as it seems the habit of these Haygarths to die; and he had never made any adjustment of his affairs.

According to the oldest inhabitant in Ullerton almshouses, this Matthew was a very handsome fellow, generous-hearted, open-handed--a devil-may-care kind of a chap, the type of the rollicking heroes in old comedies; the very man to fall over head and ears in love before he was twenty, and to go through fire and water for the sake of the woman he loved: in short, the very last man upon earth to live a bachelor until his fifty-fourth year." "He may--" "He may have been a profligate, you were going to say, and have had baser ties than those of Church and State.

So he may; but if he was a scoundrel, tradition flatters him.

Of course all the information one can gather about a man who died in 1774 must needs be of a very uncertain and fragmentary character.

But if I can trust the rather hazy recollections of my oldest inhabitant about what his father told him _his_ father had said of wild Mat Haygarth, the young man's wildness was very free from vice.