Those whose business it is to look after the game at Elveden—or “Elden,” as the country people call it—are legion. Elveden is, in fact, maintained by Lord Iveagh, just as it has always been, but now still more strictly, for sport, and here along the white ribbon of the road, or across the purple heaths, you may, in due season, see the “sportsmen” and the beaters setting forth in the morning to slay by wholesale, or in the evening returning, their lust for death and destruction sated for the day. It is undoubtedly a large question, but to the present writer it seems that the real sporting era was when the gunner spent a long day tramping the coverts, the turnip-fields, or the stubble, and sought his quarry with the hunter’s skill, rather than waiting for it to be driven to him. [Illustration: BARTON MILLS.] Elveden has seen a good many changes in the last hundred years or so. Admiral Viscount Keppel, who purchased the property in 1768, and died in 1786, left it to the fourth Earl of Albemarle, and here was born in 1799, in the old Hall, rebuilt, or rather, remodelled, in 1870, that tough one of that tough and long-lived race of Keppels, George Thomas, the sixth Earl, who as a boy of sixteen fought at Waterloo, and succeeding his elder brother in the title in 1851, died in 1891. It was somewhere about the year of Waterloo that difficulties of sorts befell the Keppels, and Elveden then passed out of their hands into those of the Newtons, an undistinguished family, who held the estate until 1863, when it was purchased by the Maharajah Duleep Singh, and thus became associated with the romance of that dispossessed ruler of Lahore. Imperial interests in India, and in greater measure the fears of the statesmen of that time, dealt harshly with that Oriental prince; excluded him from his ancestral honours, and made him a life-long stranger to his own people, and to the land of his birth. In exchange for his native rule and glorious sunshine, he was to have an annuity of “not less than £40,000 and not more than £50,000,” for “himself, his family, and dependents,” with domicile in our isle of fogs and mists. How ill the Government kept faith with him may be judged when it is stated that he never at any time received more than £25,000 a year. Strange to say, he took kindly to our ways, and settled down here as a country gentleman. With the general reduction of rents, and the heavy outlays he had made upon the reconstruction of Elveden Hall, he eventually found it necessary to have recourse to the India Office, for immediate financial aid. As a result, his income was reduced to an annual £12,000.