“Trust us for that, sir!  We know a man when we see him here; I hope they’ll do the same across the water.”

There was silence for a minute or two; and then Mark began again.

“Look!—­there’s the farm; that’s my lord’s.  I should like to show you the short-horns there, sir!—­all my Lord Ducie’s and Sir Edward Knightley’s stock; bought a bull-calf of him the other day myself for a cool hundred, old fool that I am.  Never mind, spreads the breed.  And here are mills—­four pair of new stones.  Old Whit don’t know herself again.  But I dare say they look small enough to you, sir, after your American water-power.”

“What of that?  It is just as honourable in you to make the most of a small river, as in us to make the most of a large one.”

“You speak like a book, sir.  By the by, if you think of taking home a calf or two, to improve your New England breed—­there are a good many gone across the sea in the last few years—­I think we could find you three or four beauties, not so very dear, considering the blood.”

“Thanks; but I really am no farmer.”

“Well—­no offence, I hope:  but I am like your Yankees in one thing, you see;—­always have an eye to a bit of business.  If I didn’t, I shouldn’t be here now.”

“How very tasteful!—­our own American shrubs! what a pity that they are not in flower!  What is this,” asked Stangrave,—­“one of your noblemen’s parks?”

And they began to run through the cutting in Minchampstead Park, where the owner has concealed the banks of the rail for nearly half a mile, in a thicket of azaleas, rhododendrons, and clambering roses.

“All!—­isn’t it pretty?  His lordship let us have the land for a song; only bargained that we should keep low, not to spoil his view; and so we did; and he’s planted our cutting for us.  I call that a present to the county, and a very pretty one too!  Ah, give me these new brooms that sweep clean!”

“Your old brooms, like Lord Vieuxbois, were new brooms once, and swept well enough five hundred years ago,” said Stangrave, who had that filial reverence for English antiquity which sits so gracefully upon many highly educated and far-sighted Americans.

“Worn to the stumps, now, too many of them, sir; and want new-hething, as our broom-squires would say; and I doubt whether most of them are worth the cost of a fresh bind.  Not that I can say that of the young lord.  He’s foremost in all that’s good, if he had but money; and when he hasn’t, he gives brains.  Gave a lecture, in our institute at Whitford, last winter, on the four great Poets.  Shot over my head a little, and other people’s too:  but my Mary—­my daughter, sir, thought it beautiful; and there’s nothing that she don’t know.”

“It is very hopeful, to see your aristocracy joining in the general movement, and bringing their taste and knowledge to bear on the lower classes.”