nd tired, for two or three hours before he can get his dinner like a
gentleman. And do you be like Sir John, my dear little man, when you are
your own master; and, if you want either to read hard or ride hard,
stick to the good old Cambridge hours of breakfast at eight and dinner
at five; by which you may get two days' work out of one. But, of course,
if you find a fox at three in the afternoon and run him till dark, and
leave off twenty miles from home, why you must wait for your dinner till
you can get it, as better men than you have done. Only see that, if you
go hungry, your horse does not; but give him his warm gruel and beer,
and take him gently home, remembering that good horses don't grow on the
hedge like blackberries.

It befell (to go on a second time) that Sir John, hunting all day, and
dining at five, fell asleep every evening, and snored so terribly that
all the windows in Harthover shook, and the soot fell down the
chimneys. Whereon My Lady, being no more able to get conversation out of
him than a song out of a dead nightingale, determined to go off and
leave him, and the doctor, and Captain Swinger the agent, to snore in
concert every evening to their hearts' content. So she started for the
seaside with all the children, in order to put herself and them into
condition by mild applications of iodine. She might as well have stayed
at home and used Parry's liquid horse-blister, for there was plenty of
it in the stables; and then she would have saved her money, and saved
the chance, also, of making all the children ill instead of well (as
hundreds are made), by taking them to some nasty smelling undrained
lodging, and then wondering how they caught scarlatina and diphtheria:
but people won't be wise enough to understand that till they are dead of
bad smells, and then it will be too late; besides you see, Sir John did
certainly snore very loud.

But where she went to nobody must know, for fear young ladies should
begin to fancy that there are water-babies there! and so hunt and howk
after them (besides raising the price of lodgings), and keep them in
aquariums, as the ladies at Pompeii (as you may see by the paintings)
used to keep Cupids in cages. But nobody ever heard that they starved
the Cupids, or let them die of dirt and neglect, as English young ladies
do by the poor sea-beasts. So nobody must know where My Lady went.
Letting water-babies die is as bad as taking singing birds' eggs; for,
though there