THE SQUIRE 205 



surprised," he writes, " to find so many English stablemen 

 here, some very bad, some good. The English one is always 

 preferred, because, in the first place, he is brought from a good 

 practical school ; and, secondly, if he is of the right sort, he 

 will be working whether his master is looking at him or not, 

 whereas ' monsieur'' always wants his employer to see how 

 busy he is." That is a very capital description of a workman 

 and a " make believe," and one that will apply to a great many 

 English as well as French Grooms. We have seen fellows 

 who did not know how to be hurrying and bustling enough 

 when their > masters were by, and yet who could employ 

 themselves for a whole morning in jingling a curb chain or 

 scouring a stirrup iron, \\hen there was no one looking on. 

 The great mischief of great houses, as we said before, is keeping 

 more servants than can by any possibility be worked. This is 

 what people call keeping up their station ; and though we are 

 far from wishing to see great people degenerate into little ones, 

 we should be very sorry to accept a servant from many of 

 them, even though they would pay him his wages. 



But to the hunting field. 



Modern custom has caused an amazing consumption of 

 scarlet cloth in the hunting field. We are old enough to 

 remember the time when the scarlet coat was looked upon 

 quite as the distinguishing mark of the man of independent 

 means, just as the gold epaulette is still looked upon as the 

 badge of the military or naval professions. Few men in trade 

 or business thought of riding in scarlet, except the merchant 

 princes of London, perhaps, in the palmy days of the old 

 Berkeley. In the country, where things are on a much smaller 

 scale, and people more narrowly watched, it was rarely seen. 

 Much as we desire to uphold hunting, and anxious as we are to 

 draw all real sportsmen within the scope of its enjoyments, we 

 confess we are not advocates for indiscriminate scarlet-coating. 

 It imposes on no one, but draws forth ill-natured remarks from 



