We have heard of an impatient and angry master, whose servant had acted contrary to orders, and had apologised, by saying that he thought he was doing right, and the master hastily interrupted the apology by exclaiming, “You thought! What business had you to think?” If this gentleman had employed such a servant as Colonel Crop, he would have no cause to make any such complaint. It must have been an instance of very great forgetfulness or inattention in the colonel, to make such a blunder as to take Miss Glossop for Miss Primrose. For he certainly must have heard the name of Primrose often enough; though it must be confessed that Lord Spoonbill was generally in the habit of speaking of her only as the young lady; occasionally indeed he used the name of Penelope, and that might, with so careless a man as Colonel Crop, be easily confounded with Arabella. It was a pity that the colonel was not at the castle when Miss Glossop was admiring and surveying its beauties, for then the misunderstanding might have been corrected; but the gallant officer was strolling about the fields with Lord Smatterton’s gamekeeper. CHAPTER II. When the colonel came back from his morning’s walk, and was about to prepare to dress for dinner, letters were put into his hand, and among them was one from the Earl of Smatterton to Lord Spoonbill. This of course the gallant officer handed to his lordship, and his lordship eagerly and anxiously broke the seal, and very soon possessed himself of the contents of the letter. And when he had read it he was in a most vehement and lordly passion; he tore it into what romance writers would call a thousand pieces; that is to say, he tore it across and across; and he used unprintable language, and he stamped violently and walked about the room in a violent passion, and almost frightened the poor colonel out of his wits. It was so very near dinner time that the colonel was quite concerned to see Lord Spoonbill so discomposed; and when the paroxysm of his lordship’s anger was a little abated, and his looks assumed a more “questionable shape,” the colonel ventured in his quiet, placid way, to say “I hope nothing is amiss, my lord?” “Oh, Crop, Crop!” said his lordship, almost melted to tears by the colonel’s kind sympathy, “I am the most miserable dog that ever lived.” It hurt the colonel’s feelings most keenly to hear his lordship call himself a dog, and a miserable dog too; and the gallant officer very kindly and tenderly answered, “I hope not, my lord.” Then his lordship being somewhat consoled, and his grief a little subsiding, went into the particulars of that which caused him so intemperately and thoughtlessly to call himself a miserable dog. “This letter,” said Lord Spoonbill, “is from my father, insisting on my immediate return to London, and ordering me off a hundred miles in another direction, to be elected for a newly-purchased borough.”