So for many years Payne continued to fulfil his various duties as Sir Beville’s chief retainer at Stowe. He it was who was the leader and the authority in every masculine sport. He embowelled and flayed the hunted deer, and carried the carcass on his own shoulders to the Hall, where he received as his guerdon the horns and the hide. The antlers, cleansed and polished, were hoisted as a trophy on the panelled wall; and the skins, dressed and prepared, were shaped into a jerkin for his goodly chest. It took the spoils of three full-grown red deer to make the garment complete. His master’s sons and their companions, the very pride of the West, who were housed and instructed at Stowe, when released from their graver studies, were under his especial charge. He taught them to shoot, and fish, and to handle arms. Tilt-yard and bowling-green, and the hurler’s ground, can still be identified at Stowe. In the latter, the poising-place and the mark survive, and a rough block of graywacke is called to this day “Payne’s cast;” it lies full ten paces beyond the reach whereat the ordinary players could “put the stone.” It is said that one Christmas-eve the fire languished in the Hall. A boy with an ass had been sent to the woodland for logs, and the driver loitered on his homeward way. Lady Grace lost patience, and was displeased. All at once a sudden outcry was heard at the gate, and Sir Beville’s Giant appeared with the loaded animal on his mighty back. He threw down his burden in triumph at the hearth-side, shouting merrily, “Ass and fardel! ass and fardel for my lady’s Yule!” Another time he strode along the path from Kilkhampton village to Stowe with a bacon-hog of three hundredweight thrown across his shoulders, and merely because a taunting butcher had doubted his strength for the feat. Among the excellences of Sir Beville’s Giant, it is told of him that he was by no means clumsy or uncouth, as men of unusual size sometimes are, but as nimble and elastic, and as capable of swift and dexterous movement, as a light and muscular man. Added to this, his was a strong and acute intellect; so happy also in his language, and of such a ready wit, that he was called by a writer[81] of the last century, from his resemblance, in these points only, to Shakespeare’s knight, “the Falstaff of the West.”