in it. The sons played cricket and went bat-fowling with the village
boys, and not seldom joined with them in a poaching expedition to the
paternal preserves. However popular or successful or happy a
Public-school boy might be at Eton or Harrow, he counted the days till
he could return to his pony and his gun, his ferrets and rat-trap and
fishing-rod. In after years, amid all the toil and worry of active life,
he looked back lovingly to the corner of the cover where he shot his
first pheasant, or the precise spot in the middle of the Vale where he
first saw a fox killed, and underwent the disgusting Baptism of Blood.

Girls, living more continuously at home, entered even more intimately
into the daily life of the place. Their morning rides led them across
the Village Green; their afternoon drives were often steered by the
claims of this or that cottage to a visit. They were taught as soon as
they could toddle never to enter a door without knocking, never to sit
down without being asked, and never to call at meal-time. They knew
everyone in the village--old and young; played with the babies, taught
the boys in Sunday School, carried savoury messes to the old and
impotent, read by the sick-beds, and brought flowers for the coffin.
Mamma knitted comforters and dispensed warm clothing, organized relief
in hard winters and times of epidemic, and found places for the
hobbledehoys of both sexes. The pony-boy and the scullery-maid were
pretty sure to be products of the village. Very likely the
young-ladies'-maid was a village girl whom the doctor had pronounced too
delicate for factory or farm. I have seen an excited young groom staring
his eyes out of his head at the Eton and Harrow match, and exclaiming
with rapture at a good catch, "It was my young governor as 'scouted'
that. 'E's nimble, ain't he?" And I well remember an ancient
stable-helper at a country house in Buckinghamshire who was called "Old
Bucks," because he had never slept out of his native county, and very
rarely out of his native village, and had spent his whole life in the
service of one family.

Of course, when so much of the impressionable part of life was lived
amid the "sweet, sincere surroundings of country life," there grew up,
between the family at the Hall and the families in the village, a
feeling which, in spite of our national unsentimentality, had a
chivalrous and almost feudal tone. The interest of the poor in the life
and doings of "The Family"