In the morning she attired herself in her new light blue satin robe, corsage Albanaise, with a sort of three-quarter sleeves, and muslin under ones—­something, we believe, out of the last book of fashion.  She also had her hair uncommonly well arranged, and sported a pair of clean primrose-coloured gloves.  ‘Now for victory,’ said she, as she took a parting glance at herself in general, and the hot spot in particular.

Judge of her disgust on meeting her mamma on the staircase at learning that his lordship had got up at six o’clock, and had gone to meet his hounds on the other side of the county.  That Baggs had boiled his oatmeal porridge in his bedroom, and his lordship had eaten it as he was dressing.

It may be asked, what was the maid about not to tell her.

The fact is, that ladies’-maids are only numb hands in all that relates to hunting, and though Juliana knew that his lordship was up, she thought he had gone to have his hunt before breakfast, just as the young gentlemen in the last place she lived in used to go and have a bathe.

[Illustration]

Baggs, we may add, was a married man, and Juliana and he had not had much conversation.

CHAPTER XXXVI

MR. BRAGG’S KENNEL MANAGEMENT

The reader will now have the kindness to consider that Mr. Puffington has undergone his swell huntsman, Dick Bragg, for three whole years, during which time it was difficult to say whether his winter’s service or his summer’s impudence was most oppressive.  Either way, Mr. Puffington had had enough both of him and the honours of hound-keeping.  Mr. Bragg was not a judicious tyrant.  He lorded it too much over Mr. Puffington; was too fond of showing himself off, and exposing his master’s ignorance before the servants, and field.  A stranger would have thought that Mr. Bragg, and not ‘Mr. Puff,’ as Bragg called him, kept the hounds.  Mr. Puffington took it pretty quietly at first, Bragg inundating him with what they did at the Duke of Downeybird’s, Lord Reynard’s, and the other great places in which he had lived, till he almost made Puff believe that such treatment was a necessary consequence of hound-keeping.  Moreover, the cost was heavy, and the promised subscriptions were almost wholly imaginary; even if they had been paid, they would not have covered a quarter of the expense Mr. Bragg ran him to; and worst of all, there was an increasing instead of a diminishing expenditure.  Trust a servant for keeping things up to the mark.

All things, however, have an end, and Mr. Bragg began to get to the end of Mr. Puff’s patience.  As Puff got older he got fonder of his five-pound notes, and began to scrutinize bills and ask questions; to be, as Mr. Bragg said, ‘very little of the gentleman’; Bragg, however, being quite one of your ‘make-hay-while-the-sun-shines’ sort, and knowing too well the style of man to calculate