THE NEW FOREST IN AUGUST. 



England is only a little country after all. To drive, therefore, 

 from the Midlands to the south coast is but an easy three days' 

 trip, is a little cheaper, perhaps, than going by rail, and is 

 certainly less monotonous. To do it by train takes a whole day 

 — and a very wearisome one. Besides, if time has to be killed, 

 there are worse ways of doing it than by means of a driving 

 trip. 1 am not about totrespass upon Mr. Black's province, with 

 a new edition of Adventures of a Phaeton. But I may be 

 allowed to commence with the fact that for reasons of which 

 perhaps the chief was innate idleness, I compromised the first 

 stage of the journey by sending forward Abraham, with horses 

 and trap, a day before, and cutting in with him the next 

 morning at Oxford. 



Abraham, be it known, unites in his fatherly person the 

 positions of second -horseman, valet, and occasionally of gardener. 

 It is only fair to his caste to add, that in the last capacity he is 

 an utter, though amiable, failure ; in the middle capacity he is 

 decidedly indifferent and brings much misery on himself and 

 his master ; while in the first-named he is — well — a mixed 

 quantity — his virtues being admirable, his shortcomings only 

 such as of necessity belong to the race of second horsemen and 

 the grossly unfair requirements made upon them. That is to 

 say, he doesn't drink beer by the wayside ; he doesn't gallop my 

 horses ; and he certainly daren't jump them. On the other 

 hand, he does not invariably arrive with his horse — the latter 

 cool and unruffled, sans dire — at the end of a run, quite as 

 soon as the first-flight men who have ridden neck-and-crop 

 with hounds throughout ; and he is not always in one's pocket 



