then as his nephew, then as his heir, and, fearing she might succumb to the temptation of introducing him as Mount Rorke himself, Frank escaped from her, and joined a party that Berkins was personally conducting through the grounds. The stables had been built by So-and-so on the most approved principles. There were no stables like them in Sussex--the fittings of the harness-room alone had cost him three hundred. The horses he had bought at the Duke's sale, the Duke would not have thought of parting with them had he known how they would turn out. He had driven them along the Brighton road at the rate of fifteen miles an hour; he would back them to do fifteen miles in the hour. There was not a pair of horses in England equal to them. That was Mrs. Berkins's riding horse--was it possible to imagine a more perfect cob? He could get a hundred for him any day, he did not know of anything like him. “Did any of you gentleman ever see anything like him?” They went to the kennels. A brace of Irish setters were declared to be the finest dogs that Ireland had ever produced, they had taken two prizes, one in Dublin and another in Brighton--and the little fox terrier was the gamest dog in Sussex. She would go into any hole after a fox, and never leave him till she brought him out. You couldn't find her equal. Then the glass-houses were perfect. They contained all the latest improvements, and all these were fully explained. “Berkins is excelling himself to-day,” thought Frank. Presently they came upon a basket of peaches. “These peaches were, of course, grown under glass, but I think I am right in saying, Jackson, that they were produced without artificial heat.” “Yes, sir, quite right, sir. It couldn't be done nowhere else, sir, but all the sun in Sussex seems to come down here--a regular little sun trap, I think that's what you called it the other day, sir, when you were speaking to me about them there peaches.” “Yes, I did. If you move nearer the sea you get fogs and cold winds, further inland you lose the sun, but just here the climate is equal to the south of Europe! I ask you to look at these peaches, it seems impossible--does it not?--to have peaches like these at the end of May, and without any heat, merely glass.” “It seems to me quite impossible,” declared a little fat man with flaxen hair. “I am devoted to peach-growing, and I confess I am quite at a loss. Gardener, did you say that those peaches were grown entirely without artificial heat?” The gardener pretended not to hear, and tried to slip away, but the little man, who had been taken on his hobby, was not to be baulked, and he pursued the wretched horticulturist. “You mean to say that these peaches ripened without any artificial heat, any?”