as the great Mr. did not honor the plebeian company with his presence.  This is a feature of the structure of English society which the best read American would not be likely to recognise without travelling somewhat extensively in the country.  The British Nobility, the great, world-renowned Middle Class, and the poor laboring population, constitute the three great divisions of the people and include them all in his mind.  He is apt to leave out of count the Gentry, the great untitled MISTERS, who come in between the nobility and middle-men, and constitute the connecting link between them.  “The fine old English gentleman, all of the olden time,” is supposed to belong to this class.  They make up most of “the old county families,” of which you hear more than you read.  They are generally large landholders, owning from twenty to one hundred farms.  They live in grand old mansions, surrounded with liveried servants, and inspire a mild awe and respectful admiration, not only in the common country people, but in the minds of persons in whom an American would not look for such homage to untitled rank.  They hunt with horses and dogs over the grounds of their tenant farmers, and the latter often act as game-beaters for them at their “shootings.”  When one of them owns a whole village, church and all, he is generally called “the Squire,” but most of them are squired without the definite article.  They still boast of as good specimens of “the fine old English gentleman” as the country can show; and I am inclined to think it is not an unfounded pretension, although I have not yet come in contact with many of the class.

One of this county squirocracy I know personally and well,—­and other Americans know him as well as myself,—­who, though living in a palace of his own, once occupied by an exiled French sovereign, is just as simple and honest as a child in every feature of his disposition and deportment.  Every year he has a Festival in his park, lasting two or three days.  It is a kind of out-door Parliament and a Greenwich Fair combined, as it would seem at first sight to an incidental spectator.  I do not believe anything in the rest of the wide world could equal this gathering, for many peculiar features of enjoyment.  It is made up of both sexes and all ages and conditions; especially of the laboring classes.  They come out strong on these occasions.  The round and red faced boys and girls of villages and hamlets for a great distance around look forward to this annual frolic with exhilarating expectation.  Never was romping and racing and the amorous forfeit plays of the ring got up under more favorable auspices, or with more pleasant surroundings.  It would do any man’s heart good, who was ever a genuine boy, to see the venerable squire and his lady presiding over a race between competing couples of ploughmens’ boys, from ten to fifteen years of age, running their rounds in the park, bare-footed, bare-headed, with faces as round and red as a ripe pumpkin, and hair of the same color whipping the air as they neck-and-neck it in the middle of the heat.  When the winners of the prizes receive their rewards at his hands, his kind words and the radiant benevolence of his face they value more than the conquest and the coins they win.