text:  The name of the successful purchaser had struck him with a feeling of horror; for as silence had brooded for fifty years over the history of his grandfather--and as the misty period preceding the purchase of Surbridge had given rise to a whole mythology of ancestry like to the anti-historic periods of Greece and other imaginative nations--he looked upon the appearance of the veritable contemporary of that fabulous age in the same way as Romulus would have regarded any surviving friend and companion of the real _bona fide_ robber or pig-driver to whom he probably owed his birth