A word or two further was at first said about that unfortunate wood for which Silverbridge at the present felt himself responsible.  Finn said that he was sure the Duke would look to it, if Silverbridge would mention it.  Chiltern simply groaned.  Silverbridge said nothing, remembering how many troubles he had on hand at this moment.  Then by degrees their solicitude worked itself round to the cares of a neighbouring hunt.  The A.R.U. had lost their master.  One Captain Glomax was going, and the county had been driven to the necessity of advertising for a successor.  ‘When hunting comes to that,’ said Lord Chiltern, ’one begins to think that it is in a bad way.’  It may always be observed that when hunting-men speak seriously of their sport, they speak despondingly.  Everything is going wrong.  Perhaps the same thing may be remarked in other pursuits.  Farmers are generally on the verge of ruin.  Trade is always bad.  The church is in danger.  The House of Lords isn’t worth a dozen years’ purchase.  The throne totters.

’An itinerant master with a carpet-bag never can carry on a country,’ said Mr Spooner.

‘You ought really to have a gentleman of property in the country,’ said Lord Chiltern, in a self-deprecating tone.  His father’s acres lay elsewhere.

‘It should be someone who has a real stake in the country,’ replied Mr Spooner,—­’whom the farmers can respect.  Glomax understood hunting no doubt, but the farmers didn’t care for him.  If you don’t have the farmers with you, you can’t have hunting.’  Then he filled a glass of port.

’If you don’t approve of Glomax, what do you think of a man like Major Tifto?’ asked Mr Maule.

‘That was in the Runnymede,’ said Spooner contemptuously.

‘Who is Major Tifto?’ asked Lord Chiltern.

‘He is the man,’ said Silverbridge boldly, ’who owned Prime Minister with me, when he didn’t win the Leger last September.’

‘There was a deuce of a row,’ said Maule.  Then Mr Spooner, who read his ‘Bell’s Life’ and ‘Field’ very religiously, and who never missed an article in ‘Bayley’s’, proceeded to give them an account of everything that had taken place in the Runnymede Hunt.  It mattered but little that he was wrong in all his details.  Narrations always are.  The result to which he nearly came right when he declared that the Major had been turned off, that a committed had been appointed, and that Messrs Topps and Jawstock had been threatened with a lawsuit.

‘That comes,’ said Lord Chiltern solemnly, ’of employing men like Major Tifto in places for which they are radically unfit.  I daresay Major Tifto knew how to handle a pack of hounds,—­perhaps almost as well as my huntsman.  But I don’t think a county would get on very well which appointed Fowler as Master of Hounds.  He is an honest man, and therefore would be better than Tifto.  But—­it would not do.  It is a position in which a man should at any rate be a gentleman.  If he be not,