“But at this point I used to make my escape, because there are two subjects on which nobody is so brilliant as not to be prolix, so dull as not to be enthusiastic—his doings in the saddle and his adventures with the fair. To honour either of these triumphs he blows a trumpet-note loud and long in proportion to the antiquity of the annals it records. Why must you never again become possessed of such a hunter as Tally-Ho? Did that abnormal animal really carry you as well as you think, neither failing when the ground was deep nor wavering when the fences were strong? Is it strictly true that no day was ever too long for him? that he was always in the same field with the hounds? And have not the rails he rose at, the ditches he covered so gallantly, increased annually in height and depth and general impossibility ever since that fatal morning when he broke his back, under the Coplow in a two-foot drain? “You can’t find such horses now? Perhaps you do not give them so liberal a chance of proving their courage, speed, and endurance. “On the other topic it is natural enough, I dare say, for you to ‘yarn’ with all the more freedom that there is no one left to contradict. People used enormous coloured silk handkerchiefs in that remote period, when you threw yours with such Oriental complacency, and the odalisques who picked it up are probably to-day so old and stiff they could not bend their backs to save their lives. But were they really as fond, and fair, and faithful as they seem to you now? Had they no caprices to chill, no whims to worry, no rivals on hand, to drive you mad? Like the sea, those eyes that look so deep and blue at a distance, are green and turbid and full of specks when you come quite close. Was it all sunshine with Mary, all roses with Margaret, all summer with Jane? What figures the modern women make of themselves, you say. How they offend your eye, those bare cheek-bones, those clinging skirts, those hateful _chignons_! Ah! the cheeks no longer hang out a danger-signal when you approach; the skirts are no more lifted, ever such a little, to make room for you in the corner of the sofa next the fire; and though you might have had locks of hair enough once to have woven a parti-coloured _chignon_ of your own, it would be hopeless now to beg as much as would make a finger-ring for Queen Mab. What is it, I say, that causes us to look with such deluded eyes on the past? Is it sorrow or malice, disappointment or regret? Are our teeth still on edge with the sour grapes we have eaten or forborne? Do we glower through the jaundiced eyes of malevolence, or is our sight failing with the shades of a coming night?”