232 THE HUNTING FIELD 



sex. We have heard a tenth-rate milliner knock the 

 peerage about with her tongue, just as an expert 

 billiard player knocks the balls about on the table. 

 Nay, there is our second cousin, old Miss Deborah 

 Crustyface, of Canonbury-square, Islington, in whose 

 presence it is absolutely dangerous to mention the 

 name of a nobleman, for she immediately strikes a 

 scent, and heads up and sterns down, runs into 

 them even up the third and fourth generation, not 

 unfrequently diverging into collateral alliances and 

 marriages with commoners. Not only has she Burke, 

 Lodge, and Debrett, peerage, baronetage, and all at 

 her fingers' ends, but Dodd's dignities, privileges and 

 precedence, with lists of great public functionaries 

 from the revolution down to the present time. To 

 hear her talk you would fancy she was the "lady," 

 as they now call " wives " of a Lord Chamberlain, so 

 accurately has she the ladder of consequence, called 

 precedence, arranged in her head. She knows what 

 ring of the ladder the Lord Privy Seal holds, as also 

 the legitimate consequence of a knight banneret, and 

 the place of the eldest son of a knight grand cross of 

 St. Michael and St. George. In fact the old fool is 

 peerage mad, though how she came to be " bit " 

 nobody knows ; for though in her occasional west-end 

 rambles she sees people riding in coroneted coaches 

 who she takes to be lords, she has never yet accom- 

 plished an identity so as to be able to say that is the 



Duke of A or that the Marquis of B . True, 



that in her ruminating mind, with the aid of her 

 books, assisted sometimes by Madame Tussaud's 

 exhibition, she shadows forth certain ideal personages 

 for her titles, nay, sometimes assigns the creations of 

 her mind to corporeal objects ; but she is generally 

 as wide of the mark as the celebrated would-be 

 Countess Ferrers 1 was in her descriptions of the noble- 



1 The most extraordinary action of modern, or perhaps any 

 times, was one brought by a Miss Smith, a girl of twenty, 



