all this while he was making the most ferocious
and desperate signals to his youthful heir.

'Well, she WATH in her pinnafaw, wathn't she, Ma?' says Hugh, quite
unabashed; which question Lady Hawbuck turned away with a sudden query
regarding her dear darling daughters, and the ENFANT TERRIBLE was
removed by his father.

'I hope you weren't disturbed by the music?' Ponto says. 'My girls,
you know, practise four hours a day, you know--must do it, you
know--absolutely necessary. As for me, you know I'm an early man, and in
my farm every morning at five--no, no laziness for ME.'

The facts are these. Ponto goes to sleep directly after dinner on
entering the drawing-room, and wakes up when the ladies leave off
practice at ten. From seven till ten, from ten till five, is a very fair
allowance of slumber for a man who says he's NOT a lazy man. It is my
private opinion that when Ponto retires to what is called his 'Study,'
he sleeps too. He locks himself up there daily two hours with the
newspaper.

I saw the HAWBUCK scene out of the Study, which commands the garden.
It's a curious object, that Study. Ponto's library mostly consists of
boots. He and Stripes have important interviews here of mornings,
when the potatoes are discussed, or the fate of the calf ordained, or
sentence passed on the pig, &c.. All the Major's bills are docketed on
the Study table and displayed like a lawyer's briefs. Here, too, lie
displayed his hooks, knives, and other gardening irons, his whistles,
and strings of spare buttons. He has a drawer of endless brown paper for
parcels, and another containing a prodigious and never-failing supply of
string. What a man can want with so many gig-whips I can never conceive.
These, and fishing-rods, and landing-nets, and spurs, and boot-trees,
and balls for horses, and surgical implements for the same, and
favourite pots of shiny blacking, with which he paints his own shoes
in the most elegant manner, and buckskin gloves stretched out on their
trees, and his gorget, sash, and sabre of the Horse Marines, with his
boot-hooks underneath in atrophy; and the family medicine-chest, and
in a corner the very rod with which he used to whip his son, Wellesley
Ponto, when a boy (Wellesley never entered the 'Study' but for that
awful purpose)--all these, with 'Mogg's Road Book,' the GARDENERS'
CHRONICLE, and a backgammon-board, form the Major's library. Under the
trophy there's a picture of Mrs. Ponto, in a light blue d