have been brought up to shoot, and who
hate the very name of hunting. Beamingham Hall was to be sold, and by
the beginning of May Ralph Newton had bought it. Beamingham Little
Wood belonged to the estate, and, as it contained about thirty acres,
Ralph determined that he would endeavour to have a fox there.

By the middle of May he had been four months in his new home. The
house itself was not bad. It was spacious; and the rooms, though
low, were large. And it had been built with considerable idea
of architectural beauty. The windows were all set in stone and
mullioned,--long, low windows, very beautiful in form, which had till
some fifteen years back been filled with a multitude of small diamond
panes;--but now the diamond panes had given way to plate glass. There
were three gables to the hall, all facing an old-fashioned large
garden, in which the fruit trees came close up to the house, and
that which perhaps ought to have been a lawn was almost an orchard.
But there were trim gravel walks, and trim flower-beds, and a trim
fish-pond, and a small walled kitchen-garden, with very old peaches,
and very old apricots, and very old plums. The plums, however, were
at present better than the peaches or the apricots. The fault of the
house, as a modern residence, consisted in this,--that the farm-yard,
with all its appurtenances, was very close to the back door. Ralph
told himself when he first saw it that Mary Bonner would never
consent to live in a house so placed.

For whom was such a house as Beamingham Hall originally built,--a
house not grand enough for a squire's mansion, and too large for a
farmer's homestead? Such houses throughout England are much more
numerous than Englishmen think,--either still in good repair, as was
Beamingham Hall, or going into decay under the lessened domestic
wants of the present holders. It is especially so in the eastern
counties, and may be taken as one proof among many that the
broad-acred squire, with his throng of tenants, is comparatively a
modern invention. The country gentleman of two hundred years ago
farmed the land he held. As years have rolled on, the strong have
swallowed the weak,--one strong man having eaten up half-a-dozen weak
men. And so the squire has been made. Then the strong squire becomes
a baronet and a lord,--till he lords it a little too much, and a
Manchester warehouseman buys him out. The strength of the country
probably lies in the fact that the change is ever b