The Trotter. 149 



The pedestal which had once supported the sun-dial had been snapped 

 in half, and the old sun-dial itself lay buried in a bed of nettles. 

 Several statues which had once been handsome, but every one 

 of which was in some way or other now mutilated or disfigured, 

 were scattered here and there. One chubby little leaden Cupid 

 had apparently been used as a target for Sam's pistol practice; while 

 a pond perhaps a quarter of an acre in extent, originally a famous 

 fish-stew, but now choked up with weeds and filth, the surface 

 covered with a thick green coating of slimy duckweed, formed a 

 rare breeding-place for myriads of frogs and water-newts. 



By the side of this pond was a little kind of summer-house, in a 

 tolerably good state of repair, and a well-trodden path down to it 

 proved that it was more resorted to than the upper part of the gar- 

 den. I walked up to it to have a peep in, and found that I had 

 stumbled on one of the greatest curiosities of the place, adorned in 

 a manner which the old squire, Sam's grandfather, would have little 

 dreamt of. It was apparently fitted up as a smoking-room. A 

 little, jolly-looking, three-cornered table stood in the middle of the 

 floor, and a couple of lockers, fitted into the walls, doubtless con- 

 tained the materials for a jovial evening's carouse, and many a jovial 

 carouse had those old walls witnessed. It was to these old walls that 

 my attention was particularly directed. They were not decorated 

 with pictures of any kind Sam had a soul above the flashy daubs 

 which generally adorn the walls of smoking-rooms or bachelors' 

 apartments they were not even papered, as we commonly use the 

 term; yet I question much if the most splendidly-furnished drawing- 

 room in Portland-place cost more (reckoning by the square inch) 

 to paper than the walls of that little summer-house; for nearly two 

 whole sides of the room were covered with copies of writs and 

 summonses, collected with the greatest care and during upwards of 

 a quarter of a century, by a man who had been in continual hot 

 water during the whole of that time civil, but still most pressing 

 invitations for Samuel West, of Ashby Grange, in the parish of Ashby, 

 gentleman, to appear before every judge who had ruled supreme 

 in any one or other of her Majesty's Courts of Queen's Bench, 



