Faulty Flunting Scenes. 131 
with a couple of long ashen staves, and the ceremony 
performed by him consisted in dancing these two 
sticks together in a fantastic manner to some old 
rhyme or story. 
The parlour is always full of flowers—the manitel- 
piece and grate in spring quite hidden by fresh green 
boughs of horse-chestnut in bloom, or with lilac, blue 
bells, or wild hyacinths ; in summer nodding grasses 
from the meadows, roses, sweet-briar ; in the autumn 
two or three great apples, the finest of the year, put 
as ornaménts among the china, and the corners of 
the looking-glass decorated with bunches of ripe 
wheat. A badger’s skin lies across the back of 
the armchair ; a fox’s head, the sharp white tusks 
showing, snarls over the doorway ; and in glass cases 
are a couple of stuffed kingfishers, a polecat, a white 
blackbird, and a diver—rare here—shot in the mere 
hard by. : 
On the walls are a couple of old hunting pic- 
tures, dusky with age, but the crudity of the colours 
by no means toned down or their rude contrast 
moderated : bright scarlet coats, bright white horses, 
harsh green grass, prim dogs, stiff trees, human figures 
immovable in tight buckskins ; running water hard 
as glass, the sky fixed, the ground all too small for 
the grouping, perspective painfully emphasized, so as 
to be itself made visible; the surface everywhere 
‘ painty ’—in briéf, most of the possible ‘faults com- 
7 K 2 
