He no longer mingled with the villagers in their merry-makings, but isolated himself entirely from their meetings and their pleasures.
A few years afterwards his parents died, and his elder brother assuming the control of the farm and estates of his father, Henry removed to the farm where we now find him, and to the lowly cottage which he had occupied to the time of which we write.

He became a settled misanthropist, whose only aim in life seemed to be the acquirement of wealth, and whose once genial and generous nature had now become warped into the selfishness and avarice of the miser.
So he had lived, a social hermit, until in 1845 he had become a prematurely old man, with whitened hair and furrowed brow, whose love for gold had become the passion of his life, and whose only companions were a hired man and the old violin with which, in his younger days, he was wont to make merry music at the festivals in the village, but which now was tuned to mournful harmonies "cadenced by his grief.".