It did not come under the head of sport. Harry was persuaded it lay at the core of his business, that he should attend—not only the Friarton Market, but every market within a day’s journey. He went to them no longer in his shirt sleeves, or riding a bare-backed horse as it had been taken to the watering, not even in the market cart in which he had prefigured Harry and himself crossing country—out of sight, and therefore out of danger of wounding the feelings of their aristocratic relations. Harry had modified so far his Robinson Crusoe and Vicar of Wakefield notions, as to have set up a trap handsome enough to have been driven by any of his cousins. The trap was matched by an equally well-bred, delicate, costly horse, which Harry candidly admitted was not quite ‘the cheese’ for a yeoman. Yet why not, if he rented and paid the rent of the paddock in which it ran, afforded the corn for its feeds, and took care that it should do his work in running like the wind with him and Horry to the innumerable markets and sales which the brothers found themselves forced to attend. Harry’s pride ended with his equipage. He was not to say guilty of affability; he was every man’s man, in the streets, or corn exchanges, or commercial inns where the farmers congregated. He was as ready to sit with the last man in the bar-parlour, and try return races against his trap, as to compare samples of grain in legitimate business. Harry was all things to all men—not to gain some for what he fervently believed their good, but in sheer sociality—with a vain, light-hearted, light-headed love of popularity, which was at this time his ruling passion. Horace never thwarted his brother in this or any other inclination. He remained the abiding shadow inseparable from Harry’s sunshine, and in some respects a relief from its glare. Harry was also able to derive no small amount of animation and amusement from such windfalls in the day’s routine, as brisk bouts of ratting when a stack was being pulled down, or in the granary after it was left empty; and he waited religiously every evening on the feeding of the cattle and horses in the sheds and stables. Harry was an extremely indulgent, if totally inconsiderate, and occasionally capricious, master, whose lavish tolerance was only now and then broken, like the abounding calm of tropical seas, by a storm violent as it was brief. That Harry spoilt his retainers horribly was not an objection which his servants were likely to take into account in the first flush of ‘the young squire’s’ popularity. For in spite of Harry Stanhope’s well-nigh nettled protests and vigorous acting of his part, probably because of his over-acting, the would-be yeoman was the young squire to his labourers, who in the middle of their stolidity were not altogether without shrewd observation and sound deduction.