352 THE CREAM OF LEICESTERSHIRE. [Sr.vsox 



Harboi'o' Ball, though, is a yearly cheerlul gathering of hunting 

 peojile, with their wives, daughters, diamonds, matchmaking, 

 lovemaking, and merrymaking ; and it forms a very important 

 item in the winter calendar of the Shires. Does it not, more- 

 over, mark for us the passage and effects of time (whether for 

 better or for worse) more clearly and prominently than any 

 other gauge to which our local society is subject ? It is here 

 that we look to note, year by year, who has grown old, who 

 has grown up, who is fair, and who has become fat. It is here 

 we ask ourselves with wonder if the slender maid, whose first 

 triumphant debut was on these very boards (no, it was stone, 

 with drugget loosely stretched over corn dust, in those days), 

 exists to-night in the buxom matron now taking her third turn 

 at supper. It is here we mark the gay young soldier to have 

 become the grey-haired veteran, the rosy and youthful fox- 

 Imnter to liave bloomed into the well-waistcoated grower of 

 turnips and shorthorns. A generation is but a little thing 

 after all, beautiful in its budding, comfortable and self-appre- 

 ciative in its full bloom, and awakening to dependence on its 

 own resources only in its fading age. We scarcely like to own 

 that a term of years has passed for ourselves ; but. Heavens, 

 the mark is very palpable in our cotemporaries ! How many 

 Harboro' Balls should men have seen to justify them in ap- 

 pearing with heads grizzled or bald — how many to acknowledge 

 a gTown-up daughter? They brave the lapse of time un- 

 flinchingly, perhaps, when hatted and set going with hounds, 

 though they don't ride bad-shouldered ones with careless in- 

 difference nowadays, and they generally know their horse can 

 jumj) timber before they ask him to do it. But they don't 

 foot it as lightly as when first they jingled their spurs, and, 

 somehow, the number of their dance is more often a matter of 

 mistake than it used to be. Well, but Harboro' was Avell done, 

 and well attended. The glitter of diamonds was, perhaps, 

 scarcely as remarkable as usual. But the dresses were as 

 striking to the iminitiated male as ever, and no doubt as 

 ami^le a subject for next day's converse and comparison for the 



