Colonel Nelthorpe belonged to another age, and my father also had a wide experience of a world the ways of which are now almost totally forgotten. As a very young man, in the first years of the nineteenth century, he had met Casanova at Vienna, where he had a prolonged interview with him—an interview which impressed him unfavourably and gave him but an unpleasant opinion of that prince of adventurers, whom he declared to be testy and disagreeable. In justice to Casanova, however, it must be added that my father would fly into a rage upon the slightest opportunity, and in addition nurtured a supreme contempt for all foreigners. The meeting, therefore, between the diminutive and irritable English peer and the gigantic Venetian (who, in his last years, as is well known, was in the habit of constantly getting into tempers on account of imaginary insults) could hardly have been expected to pass off in perfect peace. The sight of a foreigner, indeed, as a rule sent my father into a rage, for he seemed almost to resent the presence on earth of any other nationality except the British. Notwithstanding this, however, he for some years had a Russian valet—an importation from St. Petersburg, where he had been _chargé d’affaires_ three years before the battle of Waterloo. This valet, of colossal height and formidable appearance, was by nature the mildest of men, as was shown by the sweet and almost caressing smile which he would oppose to the storms of abuse which were wont to rage around him when anything had gone wrong. Never, perhaps, were his looks sweeter than when, as a finale to a tirade of unusual vehemence, my father would say, “Let it happen again, and as sure as I stand here I will throw you out of the window.” My father was well known as a character in that part of Norfolk in which he lived, and his friend, old Lady Suffield, known as the “Double Dow,” who resided not far away, was another. This old lady had most aristocratic ideas,—quite those of another age, indeed, for she simply could not bear to think of people of inferior birth being allowed to break down the social barriers, which, according to her, should rigidly fence in the aristocracy, and more especially the person of herself. On one occasion, when present at an assembly at the county town (Aylsham), she was horrified to discover that two local men, sons of a successful miller and merchant in that place, had obtained admission, and it was not long before she gave a very pointed demonstration of her resentment by exclaiming in a loud voice, “It is most unpleasant here. I can hardly see across the room for the flour dust.”