Dodington had either no stomach for fighting, or else was a good fellow beyond the common run, as the following affair proves. Eastbury marches with Cranborne Chase, and one day the Ranger found one of Dodington’s keepers with his dogs in a part of the Chase called Burseystool Walk. The keeper was warned that if he was found there again, his dogs would be shot and himself prosecuted; but despite this warning he was found near the same spot a few days later, when the Ranger, having a gun in his hand, put his threat into execution and shot the three dogs as they were drinking in a pool, with their heads close together, in one of the Ridings. Dodington, in a first outburst of fury, sent a challenge to the Ranger over this affair, and the Ranger bought a sword and sent a friend to call on the challenger to fix time and place for the encounter; but by that time Dodington had thought better of it, and instead of making arrangements to shed the enemy’s gore, invited both him and his friend to dinner. They met and had a jovial time together, and the sword remained unspotted. On Dodington’s death his estates passed to Earl Temple, who could not afford to keep up the vast place. He accordingly offered an income of £200 a year to anyone who would live at Eastbury and keep it in repair. No one came forward to accept these terms; and so, after the pictures, objects of art, and the furniture had been sold, the great house was pulled down, piecemeal, in 1795, with the exception of this solitary fragment. There is room for much reflection in Eastbury Park to-day, by the crumbling archway with the two large fir-trees growing between the joints of its masonry; by the remaining wing, or the foundations of the rest of the vanished house, which can still be distinctly traced in the grass during dry summers. The stories of ‘Haunted Eastbury’ and of the headless coachman and his four-in-hand are dying out, but the panelled room in which Doggett, Earl Temple’s fraudulent steward, shot himself is still to be seen. Doggett had embezzled money, and when discovered found this the only way out of his trouble. When the church of Tarrant Gunville, just outside the Park gates, was rebuilt in 1845 the workmen found his body, the legs tied together with a yellow silk ribbon which was as bright and fresh as the day it was tied. XXXVI