Sir Tation Sykes. 225 



ride with Tom Carter his huntsman ;* the Leicester- 

 shire ram-lettings ; the three visits to York and Don- 

 caster races ; and then, at the fall of the leaf, his 

 friends in Holderness knew that he would be there to 

 an hour to sell his bullocks, and marshal his young 

 horses on the marshes, and meet the old party once 

 more. Her ladyship might go to London for the 

 season, but he was not to be tempted away from 

 Sledmere when the spring grass was bringing out " the 

 Buckley legs of mutton" in the lambs, and the year- 

 lings were fast coming to hand for York. 



There was no spot more fitted by nature for this 

 pleasant pastoral of the Wolds. The inscription on 

 the pillared fountain by the road-side bore testimony 

 to what his father Sir Christopher had done in re- 

 claiming those primitive hunting-grounds of Squire 

 Draper of Beswick and his daughter Di ; and for forty 

 years Sir Tatton had followed steadily in his track, 

 with his hedges, farm-buildings, ponds, and planting. 

 Now, not one stone is left upon another of Falconer's 

 Hall, and if Sans Quartier — that Nana Sahib of fal- 

 cons — could be unhooded among the partridges, he 

 would not know his old haunts again, and career over 

 the enclosures far away from his lure. You wend your 

 four miles from Fimber station to Sledmere, past rich 

 wheat or turnip crops, or down an ever-winding ashen 

 glade. The gallop at Marramat, over which " the 

 long, thin, and lazy lad" from Newmarket — alias the 

 redoubtable Sam Chifney — used to give Sir Mark's 

 horses their breathers in Searle's day, is quite hid ; 

 and it takes all Snarry's eloquence to convince you, as 

 you look from the Castle Field, that Tibthorpe Farm 

 was once only a breezy wold, and " a good bit of 

 Boddle a rabbit-warren." Sledmere lies deeply em- 

 bosomed in woods, with its church scarcely a bow- 



See " Scott and Sebright," p. 325. 



Q 



