142 mr. sponge's sporting tour. 



CHAPTER XXIV. 



LORD SCAMPERDALE AT HOME. 



"We fear our fair friends will expect something gay from the above 

 heading — lamps and flambeaux outside, fiddlers, feathers, and flirters 

 in. ]N othing of the sort, fair ladies — nothing of the sort. Lord Scam- 

 perdale " at home," simply means that his lordship was not out hunt- 

 ing that he had got his dirty boots and breeches off, and dry tweeds 

 and tartans on. 



Lord Scamperdale was the eighth earl : and, according to the 

 usual alternating course of great English families — one generation 

 living and the next starving — it was his lordship's turn to live ; but 

 the seventh earl having been rather unreasonable in the length of 

 his lease, the present earl, who during the lifetime of his father was 

 Lord Hardup, had contracted such parsimonious habits, that when 

 he came into possession he could not shake them off ; and but for the 

 fortunate friendship of Abraham Brown, the village blacksmith, who 

 had given his young idea a sporting turn, entering him with ferrets 

 and rabbits, and so training him on with terriers and rat-catching, badg- 

 er-bating and otter-hunting, up to the noble sport of fox-hunting it- 

 self, in all probability his lordship would have been a regular miser. 

 As it was, he did not spend a halfpenny upon anything but hunting ; 

 and his hunting, though well, was still economically done, costing 

 him some couple of thousand a-year, to which, for the sake of euphony, 

 Jack used to add an extra five hundred ; " two thousand five underd 

 a-year, five-and-twenty underd a-year," sounding better, as Jack 

 thought, and more imposing than a couple of thousand, or two thou- 

 sand a year. Then there were few days on which Jack didn't inform the 

 field what the hounds cost his lordship, or rather what they didn't 

 cost him. 



Woodmansterne, his lordship's principal residence, was a fine place. 

 It stood in an undulating park of 800 acres, with its church, and its 

 lakes and its heronry, and its decoy, and its race-course, and its varied 

 grasses of the choicest kinds, for feeding the numerous herds of deer, 

 so well known at Temple Bar and Charing-cross as the Woodmansterne 

 venison. The house was a modern edifice, built by the sixth earl, 

 who, having been a " liver," had run himself aground by his enormous 

 outlay on this Italian structure, which was just finished when he died. 

 The fourth earl, who, we should have stated, was a " liver " too, was 

 a man of viriii — a great traveller and collector of coins, pictures, 

 statues, marbles, and curiosities generally — things that are very dear 

 to buy, but oftentimes extremely cheap when sold ; and having col- 



