more thorough acquaintance with the science of music than is
usual in an amateur.

Morton Berkeley sought no career; he lived with his mother and
sister, Lady Mary, at Cranford, his principal pleasure and
occupation being the preservation of the game on the estate--an
object of not very easy accomplishment, owing to the proximity of
Cranford to London, the distance being only twelve miles by
railroad, and the facilities thus offered of escape and impunity to
poachers necessarily considerable. The tract immediately round
Cranford was formerly part of the famous, or rather infamous,
Hounslow Heath; and I have heard Mr. Henry Berkeley say that in his
youth he remembered perfectly, when he went to London with his
father, by day or night, loaded pistols were an invariable part of
the carriage furniture.

My first acquaintance with Mr. Morton Berkeley's devotion to the
duties of a gamekeeper was made in a very singular manner, and
accompanied by a revelation of an unexpected piece of sentiment.

---- and myself were visiting at Cranford on one occasion, when the
only strangers there beside ourselves were Lady C----, Lord and Lady
S----, and Lord F---- and his sister, a lady of some pretensions to
beauty, but still more to a certain fashionable elegance of
appearance, much enhanced by her very Parisian elaborateness of
toilette.

One night, when the usual hour for retiring had come, the ladies,
who always preceded the gentlemen by some hours to their sleeping
apartments, had left the large room on the ground-floor, where we
had been spending the evening. As we ascended the stairs, my
attention was attracted by some articles of dress which lay on one
of the window-seats: a heavy, broad-brimmed hat, a large rough
pea-jacket, and a black leather belt and cutlass--a sort of
coastguard costume which, lying in that place, excited my curiosity.
I stopped to examine them, and Lady Mary exclaiming, "Oh, those are
Morton's night-clothes; he puts them on when everybody is gone to
bed, to go and patrol with the gamekeeper round the place. _Do_ put
them on for fun;" she seized them up and began accoutring me in
them.

When I was duly enveloped in these very peculiar trappings, we all
burst into fits of laughter, and it was instantly proposed that we
should all return to the drawing-r