On a low table is placed the tea equipage, and tea in beautiful little cups is being dispensed by fair hands.  This is a very pleasant time in many houses, and particularly favorable to fun and flirtation.  In houses where there are children, the cousins of the house and others very intimate adjourn to the school-room, where, when the party is further reinforced by three or four boys home for the holidays, a scene of fun and frolic, which it requires all the energies of the staid governess to prevent going too far, ensues.

So time speeds on until the dressing-bell rings at seven o’clock, summoning all to prepare for the great event of the day—­dinner.  Every one dons evening-attire for this meal; and so strong a feeling obtains on this point that if, in case of his luggage going wrong or other accident, a man is compelled to join the party in morning-clothes, he feels painfully “fish-out-of-waterish.”  We know, indeed, of a case in which a guest absurdly sensitive would not come down to dinner until the arrival of his things, which did not make their appearance for a week.

Ladies’ dress in country-houses depends altogether upon the occasion.  If it be a quiet party of intimate friends, their attire is of the simplest, but in many fashionable houses the amount of dressing is fully as great as in London.  English ladies do not dress nearly as expensively or with so much taste as Americans, but, on the other hand, they have the subject much less in their thoughts; which is perhaps even more desirable.

There is a degree of pomp and ceremony, which, however, is far from being unpleasant, at dinner in a large country-house.  The party is frequently joined by the rector and his wife, a neighboring squire or two, and a stray parson, so that it frequently reaches twenty.  Of course in this case the pleasantness of the prandial period depends largely upon whom you have the luck to get next to; but there’s this advantage in the situation over a similar one in London—­that you have, at all events, a something of local topics in common, having picked up a little knowledge of places and people during your stay, or if you are quite a new-comer, you can easily set your neighbor a-going by questions about surroundings.  Generally there is some acquaintance between most of the people staying in a house, as hosts make up their parties with the view of accommodating persons wishing to meet others whom they like.  Young men will thus frequently get a good-natured hostess to ask some young lady whose society they especially affect, and thus country-houses become proverbially adapted for match-making.

There are few houses now-a-days in which the gentlemen linger in the dining-room long after the ladies have left it.  Habits of hard drinking are now almost entirely confined to young men in the army and the lower classes.  The evenings are spent chiefly in conversation:  sometimes a rubber of whist is made up, or, if there are a number of young people, there is dancing.