Sir Charles Mitford had not been guilty of any exaggeration when he announced his intention of filling his house at Redmoor with a very pleasant set of people. If a man have a kindly genial temper, a sense of humour, a desire to be pleasant to his fellow-creatures, such qualities, however they may have hitherto been concealed, will make themselves felt during a sojourn at a friend's well-filled country-house. There the heavy man, who has sat by one at a dozen dinner-parties during the season and never opened his mouth except to fill it, is discovered to be full of antiquarian erudition about the old castles and abbeys in the neighbourhood; and imparts his information, pleasantly studded with quaint anecdote and pungent remark. There Lady Katherine gives up her perpetual simper, and rests her aching lips, and occasionally covers her gleaming teeth. There Mrs. Phillimore mixes for a while with people in her own rank of life, and temporarily denies herself the pleasure of hunting orphans into asylums, and dealing out tea and Bibles to superannuated crones. Grinsby would have gone through life despised as a cockney _littérateur_,--indeed, they intended to have immense fun out of him at the Duke's,--if he had not knocked over that brace of woodcock, right and left barrel; if, in fact, he had not made better shooting than any other man of the party; and Tom Copus would never have given that delicious imitation of little Mr. Loudswell, the blatant barrister, had it not been coaxed out of him during the private theatricals at Eversholt Park. What glorious flirtations, what happy marriages, what fun, enjoyable at the time, and lasting source of retrospective enjoyment for long after, have arisen from the gatherings in country-houses! In these days of imitation it is also gratifying to know that country-house society is essentially English. Monseigneur le Duc de Hausse et Baisse has a gathering at his _terre_, or the Graf von Hasenbraten fills his ancestral castle at Suchverloren with intending assistants at a _treibejagd_: but the French people are very unhappy; they long to be back in Paris, and they seek consolation in dressing and behaving exactly as if they had never quitted that city; while the manner of life among the Germans alters never;--to shoot a very little, to eat and drink a great deal, and the "sooner it's over the sooner to sleep,"--such are the simple conditions of Teutonic happiness.