On the sideboard are three beautiful silver dishes with spirit-lamps beneath them.  Let us look under their covers.  Broiled chicken, fresh mushrooms on toast, and stewed kidney.  On a larger dish is fish, and ranged behind these hot viands are cold ham, tongue, pheasant and game-pie.  On huge platters of wood, with knives to correspond, are farm-house brown bread and white bread, whilst on the breakfast-table itself you will find hot rolls, toast—­of which two or three fresh relays are brought in during breakfast—­buttered toast, muffins and the freshest of eggs.  The hot dishes at breakfast are varied almost every morning, and where there is a good cook a variety of some twenty dishes is made.

Marmalade (Marie Malade) of oranges—­said to have been originally prepared for Mary queen of Scots when ill, and introduced by her into Scotland—­and “jams” of apricot and other fruit always form a part of an English or Scotch breakfast.  The living is just as good—­often better—­among the five-thousand-pounds-a-year gentry as among the very wealthy:  the only difference lies in the number of servants and guests.

The luncheon-hour is from one to two.  At luncheon there will be a roast leg of mutton or some such piece de resistance, and a made dish, such as minced veal—­a dish, by the way, not the least understood in this country, where it is horribly mangled—­two hot dishes of meat and several cold, and various sorts of pastry.  These, with bread, butter, fruit, cheese, sherry, port, claret and beer, complete the meal.

Few of the men of the party are present at this meal, and those who are eat but little, reserving their forces until dinner.  All is placed on the table at once, and not, as at dinner, in courses.  The servants leave the room when they have placed everything on the table, and people wait on themselves.  Dumb-waiters with clean plates, glasses, etc. stand at each corner of the table, so that there is very little need to get up for what you want.

The afternoon is usually passed by the ladies alone or with only one or two gentlemen who don’t care to shoot, etc., and is spent in riding, driving and walking.  Englishwomen are great walkers.  With their skirts conveniently looped up, and boots well adapted to defy the mud, they brave all sorts of weather.  “Oh it rains! what a bore!  We can’t go out,” said a young lady, standing at the breakfast-room window at a house in Ireland; to which her host rejoined, “If you don’t go out here when it rains, you don’t go out at all;” which is pretty much the truth.

About five o’clock, as you sit over your book in the library, you hear a rapid firing off of guns, which apprises you that the men have returned from shooting.  They linger a while in the gun-room talking over their sport and seeing the record of the killed entered in the game-book.  Then some, doffing the shooting-gear for a free-and-easy but scrupulously neat attire, repair to the ladies’ sitting-room or the library for “kettledrum.”