subtle way the Cornish country gentlemen as they were in the days
before rotten boroughs were abolished. Within a few miles' radius of
Trevarthenick were two little agricultural townlets, hardly more than
villages, which together were represented in those days by four members
of Parliament. Old Lady Molesworth, Sir Louis's remarkable mother, who
when she was ninety-five was as vigorous as most women of sixty, looked
on any landowner as a parvenu who had not been a territorial magnate
before the days of Henry VIII. When I think of these people and their
surroundings I am reminded of an opinion I once expressed to an artist
well known as a luminary of some new school of painting. When I met him
at the house of a friend he told me that he had abandoned painting, and
was applying his artistic principles to the manufacture of furniture. He
kindly explained to me in somewhat technical language what the
principles of the new art as applied to furniture were. I apologized for
my inability to understand them, and confessed to him that my own taste
in furniture was not so much artistic as political, and that the kind of
chair, for example, which gave me most satisfaction was one that had
been made and used before the first Reform bill.

The houses already referred to as successive scenes of Christmas and New
Year visits were Hewel Grange, Lord Plymouth's, near Bromsgrove, and
Byram, Sir John Ramsden's, about twenty miles from York.

Hewel Grange, which has taken the place of an old house, now abandoned,
is itself entirely modern. Of all the considerable houses built in
England during the last thirty years, it is, so far as I know, the most
perfect as a specimen of architecture. Externally its style is that of
the early seventeenth century, but its great hall is a monument of
Italian taste subdued to English traditions and the ways of English
life. New though the structure is, the red sandstone of its walls and
gables has been already so colored by the weather that they look like
the growth of centuries, and whatever is exotic in the interior carries
the mind back to the times of John of Padua.

To pass from Hewel to Byram was to pass from one world to another,
though both were saturated with traditions of old English life. Byram,
standing as it does in a territory of absolutely flat deer park, gives,
with its stuccoed walls and narrow, oblong windows, no hint of intended
art. Parts of it are of considerable age, but it represen