“Welcome, welcome to Hurst Court, lieutenant!” cried his host, seizing him by the hand with a grip like a blacksmith’s, and promptly leading him in the direction of the music-room, across a floor where a couple of stag-hounds were lying lazily stretched out, and between walls laden with antlers and the grinning pates of three or four score foxes. “You should have come a couple of hours sooner; for the ladies have a mind to show you their Dutch garden, and to regale you with some music before we dine. I know not, sir, whether such diversions are to your taste, or whether your liking runs more in the direction of fox-hunting and the shooting of game, as mine does? I have no taste, myself, for your finicking London modes; but I’m told that the young bucks nowadays pride themselves more on cutting a fine figure in the ladies’ drawing-rooms than in sitting a horse well and riding straight to hounds.” “Nay, squire, it will give me vast pleasure to hear the ladies’ music,” said Lieutenant Tregenna, when his host’s volubility allowed him the chance of answering. “’Tis a diversion one can enjoy but seldom so far from town.” “Nay, we have better diversions here than those,” said the squire disparagingly. “But my wife and daughters will be prodigious pleased that you are not of my way of thinking. For a stranger in these parts is a mighty welcome arrival, I assure you, and like to be made much of.” Indeed, it was quite perceptible to the lieutenant that there was a flutter of excitement going on in the music-room up to the very moment of his entrance; and the welcome he got from the squire’s wife and two daughters was quite as sincere, though not so tempestuous, as that of the host himself. For Mrs. Waldron and the two young misses, her daughters, were quite as much in love with the pleasures of the town as the husband and father was with those of the country. And in dress, manner, conversation, and tone they marked the difference between themselves and him as ostentatiously as possible. Thus, while the squire wore the old-fashioned Ramillies wig, with its bush of powdered hair at the sides, and long pigtail tied at the top and bottom with black ribbon, and the loosely-fitting scarlet coat which he had worn for any number of years, his good wife and two round-faced, simpering daughters were all attired in the latest modes of the town. They all three wore the loose sacque or _negligee_, which was then the height of fashion; they tottered about in slim-heeled shoes, under huge hoops which swayed as they walked; while their hair was all dressed in the same way—knotted up tightly under the smallest and closest of caps, making their heads look singularly small and mean, when compared with the enormous width of their distended skirts.