Squerryes Court, near Westerham, in Kent, is an ample and pleasant mansion in the Queen Anne style, which has long been in the possession of the Warde family--they are very particular about the _e_. In later times it was the abode of a memorable character in his way--old John Warde, the "Father of Fox-hunting." There it was that the greatest of all fox-hunters, Asheton Smithe, when on a visit to John Warde, rode Warde's horse _Blue Ruin_ over a frozen country through a fast run of twenty-five minutes and killed his fox. On the terrace stands a monument. It marks the spot where in 1741, James Wolfe, the son of Lieut-Col. Wolfe, of Westerham, then barely fourteen years of age, was playing with two young Wardes, when the father of the playmates approached and handed him a large letter "On His Majesty's Service" which, on being opened, was found to contain his commission in the army. We may be sure that the young face flushed with undisguised emotion. There cannot be a greater contrast than that which the frank, impulsive features, sanguine complexion, and blue eyes of Wolfe present to the power expressed in the commanding brow, the settled look, and the evil eye [Footnote: The late Lord Russell, who had seen Napoleon at Elba, used to say that there was something very evil in his eye.] of Napoleon. James Wolfe was a delicate child, and though he grew energetic and fearless, never grew strong, or ceased to merit the interest which attaches to a gallant spirit in a weak frame. He escaped a public school, and without any forfeiture of the manliness which public schools are supposed exclusively to produce, retained his home affections and his tenderness of heart. He received the chief part of his literary education in a school at Greenwich, where his parents resided, and he at all events learned enough Latin to get himself a dinner, in his first campaign on the Continent, by asking for it in that language. He is grateful to his schoolmaster, Mr. Stebbings, and speaks of him with affection in afterlife. But no doubt his military intelligence, as well as his military tastes, was gained by intercourse with his father, a real soldier, who had pushed his way by merit in an age of corrupt patronage, and was Adjutant-General to Lord Cathcart's forces in 1740. Bred in a home of military duty, the young soldier saw before him a worthy example of conscientious attention to all the details of the profession--not only to the fighting of battles, but to the making of the soldiers with whom battles are to be fought.