reminds one of the red-faced sportsmen who always appeared early in the first

act of an old-fashioned musical comedy, the setting being the village green.

They usually sang a song about going up to London. Nowadays we have revues, and

the country squire has died out of musical fashion.

 

Of course, Ackroyd is not really a country squire. He is an immensely successful

manufacturer of (I think) wagon wheels. He is a man of nearly fifty years of

age, rubicund of face and genial of manner.

 

He is hand and glove with the vicar, subscribes liberally to parish funds

(though rumor has it that he is extremely mean in personal expenditure),

encourages cricket matches, Lads’ Clubs, and Disabled Soldiers’ Institutes. He

is, in fact, the life and soul of our peaceful village of King’s Abbot.

 

Now when Roger Ackroyd was a lad of twenty-one, he fell in love with, and

married, a beautiful woman some five or six years his senior. Her name was

Paton, and she was a widow with one child. The history of the marriage was short

and painful. To put it bluntly, Mrs. Ackroyd was a dipsomaniac. She succeeded in

drinking herself into her grave four years after her marriage.

 

In the years that followed, Ackroyd showed no disposition to make a second

matrimonial adventure. His wife’s child by her first marriage was only seven

years old when his mother died. He is now twenty-five.

 

Ackroyd has always regarded him as his own son, and has brought him up