For people who had a country house the interests of life were very much bound up in the park and the covers, the croquet-ground and the cricket-ground, the kennel, the stable, and the garden. I remember, when I was an undergraduate, lionizing some Yorkshire damsels on their first visit to Oxford, then in the "high midsummer pomp" of its beauty. But all they said was, in the pensive tone of an unwilling exile, "How beautifully the sun must be shining on the South Walk at home!" The village church was a great centre of domestic affection. All the family had been christened in it. The eldest sister had been married in it. Generations of ancestry mouldered under the chancel floor. Christmas decorations were an occasion of much innocent merriment, and a little ditty high in favour in Tractarian homes warned the decorators to be-- "Unselfish--looking not to see Proofs of their own dexterity; But quite contented that 'I' should Forgotten be in brotherhood." Of course, whether Tractarian or Evangelical, religious people regarded church-going as a spiritual privilege; but every one recognized it as a civil duty. "When a gentleman is _sur ses terres_," said Major Pendennis, "he must give an example to the country people; and, if I could turn a tune, I even think I should sing. The Duke of St. David's, whom I have the honour of knowing, always sings in the country, and let me tell you it has a doosed fine effect from the family pew." Before the passion for "restoration" had set in, and ere yet Sir Gilbert Scott had transmogrified the parish churches of England, the family pew was indeed the ark and sanctuary of the territorial system--and a very comfortable ark too. It had a private entrance, a round table, a good assortment of arm-chairs, a fireplace, and a wood-basket. And I well remember a washleather glove of unusual size which was kept in the wood-basket for the greater convenience of making up the fire during divine service. "You may restore the church as much as you like," said an old friend of my youth, who was lay-rector, to an innovating incumbent, "but I must insist on my family pew not being touched. If I had to sit in an open seat, I should never get a wink of sleep again." A country home left its mark for all time on those who were brought up in it. The sons played cricket and went bat-fowling with the village boys, and not seldom joined with them in a poaching enterprise in the paternal preserves. However popular or successful or happy a Public-School boy might be at Eton or Harrow, he counted the days till he could return to his pony and his gun, his ferrets and rat-trap and fishing-rod. Amid all the toil and worry of active life, he looked back lovingly to the corner of the cover where he shot his first pheasant, or the precise spot in the middle of the Vale where he first saw a fox killed, and underwent the disgusting baptism of blood.