was an optimist in most other matters, and found it impossible to conceive a state of affairs when he would be unable to do—­approximately—­whatever he had a mind for.  At the age of fifty-eight, fortitude and endurance are something of a difficulty for a gentleman unused to the exercise of either of these fine qualities, and after keeping the Broadwater Vale Hounds, for seventeen years, as hounds should be kept, regardless of the caprices of the subscription list, Major-Talbot-Lowry felt that he had deserved better of his country than that he should now have to institute minor economies, such as putting his men into brown breeches, foregoing the yearly renewal of their scarlet coats, and other like humiliations.  Farther than details such as these, his sense of right and wrong did not permit him to go.

“There are some things that they can’t expect a gentleman to do,” he would say to his cousin, Miss Coppinger, “and as long as I keep the hounds—­”

“Then, my dear Dick, if you can’t afford them, why keep them?” Frederica would rejoin, with unsparing common-sense.

Unmarried ladies of mature age, have, as a rule, learned not only fortitude and endurance, but have also mastered the fact that ways are governed by means.  Those processes of erosion, however, to which reference has been made, were, comparatively speaking, slow in operation, and there remained always Lady Isabel’s twenty thousand golden sovereigns, as safe and secluded in the hands of trustees (who had a constitutional disbelief in Irishmen), as if they were twenty thousand nuns under the rule of a royal abbess.

Therefore did Major Talbot-Lowry, M.F.H., and the Broadwater Vale Hounds, make a creditable show, brown breeches and last season’s pink coats notwithstanding, at the meet at Coppinger’s Court, on December 26th of the year 1897.  The weather was grey and silver, with a light southeast wind and a rising glass.  Sunshine was filtering down, as it were through muslin curtains that might at any moment be withdrawn; some crocuses and snowdrops had appeared in the grass round the wide gravel sweep in front of the house; there was a perplexed primrose or two, deceived by the sun as to the date; the scent of the violets in the bed under the drawing-room windows, came in delicate whiffs round the corner of the house.  It would have been impossible to believe that but twenty-four hours ago, Christmas hymns had been shouted, and Christmas presents presented, had not a group of “Wran-boys” offered irrefutable testimony that this was indeed the Feast of Stephen.  These, a ragged and tawdry little cluster of mummers, shabby survivors of mediaeval mysteries, were gathered round their ensign holly-bush in front of the hall-door steps.  From the holly-bush swung the corpse of the wren, and from the throats of the Wran-Boys came the song that recounts the wicked wren’s pursuit and slaughter: 

  “The Wran, the Wran, the King of all birds,
  On Stephenses’ Day was cot in the furze,
  And though he is little, his family is great,
  Rise up, good gentlemen, and give us a thrate—­Huzzay!”