sing, too, that he
must abandon all ambitions in the great world, he determined to retire
absolutely from it and to create, as it were, at Crome a private
world of his own, in which all should be proportionable to himself.
Accordingly, he discharged all the old servants of the house and
replaced them gradually, as he was able to find suitable successors,
by others of dwarfish stature. In the course of a few years he had
assembled about himself a numerous household, no member of which was
above four feet high and the smallest among them scarcely two feet and
six inches. His father's dogs, such as setters, mastiffs, greyhounds,
and a pack of beagles, he sold or gave away as too large and too
boisterous for his house, replacing them by pugs and King Charles
spaniels and whatever other breeds of dog were the smallest. His
father's stable was also sold. For his own use, whether riding or
driving, he had six black Shetland ponies, with four very choice piebald
animals of New Forest breed.

"Having thus settled his household entirely to his own satisfaction, it
only remained for him to find some suitable companion with whom to share
his paradise. Sir Hercules had a susceptible heart, and had more than
once, between the ages of sixteen and twenty, felt what it was to love.
But here his deformity had been a source of the most bitter humiliation,
for, having once dared to declare himself to a young lady of his choice,
he had been received with laughter. On his persisting, she had picked
him up and shaken him like an importunate child, telling him to run away
and plague her no more. The story soon got about--indeed, the young lady
herself used to tell it as a particularly pleasant anecdote--and
the taunts and mockery it occasioned were a source of the most acute
distress to Hercules. From the poems written at this period we gather
that he meditated taking his own life. In course of time, however, he
lived down this humiliation; but never again, though he often fell in
love, and that very passionately, did he dare to make any advances to
those in whom he was interested. After coming to the estate and finding
that he was in a position to create his own world as he desired it, he
saw that, if he was to have a wife--which he very much desired, being
of an affectionate and, indeed, amorous temper--he must choose her as
he had chosen his servants--from among the race of dwarfs. But to find
a suitable wife was, he found, a matter of some