treats me to such grateful
recollections as the present."

Lord Glengariffs table was a good specimen of country-house living. All
the materials were excellent, and the cookery reasonably good; his wine
was exquisite,--the years and epochs connoisseurship loves to dwell
upon; but Mr. Dunn ate sparingly and drank little. He had passed forty
without gourmand tastes, and no man takes to epicurism after that. His
Lordship beheld, not without secret dissatisfaction, his curdiest salmon
declined, his wonderful "south-down" sent away scarcely tasted, and,
horror of horrors! saw water mixed with his 1815 claret as if it were a
"little Bordeaux wine" at a Swiss _table d'hote_.

"Mr. Dunn has no appetite for our coarse country fare, Augusta," said
Lord Glengariff; "you must take him over the cliffs, to-morrow, and let
him feel the sharp Glengariff air. There's nothing but hunger for it."

"Pardon me, my Lord, if I say that I accept with gratitude the proposed
remedy, though I don't acknowledge a just cause for it. I am always a
poor eater."

"Tell him of Beverley, Augusta, tell him of Beverley," said my Lord.

"Oh, it was simply a case similar to your own," said she, hesitatingly,
"and, in all probability, incurred in the same way. The Duke of
Beverley, a very hard-worked man, as you know, always at Downing Street
at ten, and never leaving it till night, came here two years ago, to
pass a few weeks with us, and although hale and stout, to look at, could
eat nothing,--that is, he cared for nothing. It was in vain we put in
requisition all our little culinary devices to tempt him; he sat down
with us, and, like yourself, would fain persuade us that he dined, but
he really touched nothing; and, in utter despair, I determined to try
what a course of open air and exercise would do."

"She means eight hours a day hard walking, Dunn," chimed in Lord
Glengariff; "a good grouse-shooter's pace, too, and cross country."

"Well, confess that my remedy succeeded," said she, triumphantly.

"That it did. The Duke went back to town fifteen years younger. No one
knew him; the Queen did not know him. And to this day he says, 'Whenever
I'm hipped or out of sorts, I know what a resource I have in the
Glengariff heather.'"

It is possible that Davenport Dunn listened with more of interest to
this little incident because the hero of it was a Duke and a Cabinet
Minister.

Assuredly the minor ills of life, the petty stomachic miseries, and su