n the house, and put a price on
whatever he cared to sell. Terrell made a full list, putting what
seemed to him fair prices on most of the furniture, and high ones--
prohibitive he thought--on the sticks he had a fancy to keep. The Rajah
glanced over the paper in his grand manner, and says he, "I'll take it
all." "Stop! stop!" cried Terrell, "I bain't going to let you have the
bed I was married in!" "As you please; we'll strike out the bed,
then," the Rajah answered. That is how he took possession.

Burrator House, as I daresay you know, faces across the Meavy upon
Burrator Wood; and the wood, thanks to Terrell, had always been a sure
draw for a fox. I had tramped over from Tavistock on this particular
morning,--for I was new to the country, a young man looking around me
for a practice, and did not yet possess a horse,--and I sat on the slope
above the house, at the foot of the tor, watching the scene on the
opposite bank. The fixture, always a favourite one, and the Rajah's
hospitality--which was noble, like everything about him--had brought out
a large and brightly-dressed field; and among them, in his black coat,
moved Terrell on a horse twice as good as it looked. He had ridden over
from his new home, and I daresay in the rush of old associations had
forgotten for the while that the familiar place was no longer his.

The Rajah, a statue of a man, sat on a tall grey at the covert's edge,
directly below me; and from time to time I watched him through my
field-glass. He had lately recovered from a stroke of paralysis, and
was (I am told) the wreck of his old self; but the old fire lived in the
ashes. He sat there, tall, lean, upright as a ramrod, with his eyes
turned from the covert and gazing straight in front, over his horse's
ears, on the rushing Meavy. He had forgotten the hounds; his care for
his guests was at an end; and I wondered what thoughts, what memories of
the East, possessed him. There is always a loneliness about a great
man, don't you think? But I have never felt one to be so terribly--yes,
terribly--alone as the Rajah was that morning among his guests and the
Devonshire tors.

"Every inch a king," said a voice at my elbow, and a little man settled
himself down on the turf beside me. I set down my glasses with a start.
He was a spare dry fellow of about fifty, dressed in what I took for the
working suit of a mechanic. Certainly he did not belong to the moor.
He wore no collar, but a din