About a week after, Tom and Chloe in their turn appeared at our cottage. All had gone right in the matter of the surcharge. The commissioners had decided in Mrs. King's favour, and Mr. Poulton had been forced to succumb. But his grandmother had considered the danger of offending their good landlord Sir John, by keeping a sporting dog so near his coverts, and also the difficulty of paying the tax; and both she and Tom had made up their minds to offer Chloe to my father. He had admired her, and everybody said that he was as good a dog-master as Mr. Poulton was a bad one; and he came sometimes coursing to Ashley End, and then perhaps he would let them both see poor Chloe; "for grandmother," added Tom, "though she seemed somehow ashamed to confess as much, was at the bottom of her heart pretty nigh as fond of her as he was himself. Indeed, he did not know who could help being fond of Chloe, she had so many pretty ways." And Tom, making manful battle against the tears that would start into his eyes, almost as full of affection as the eyes of Chloe herself, and hugging his beautiful pet, who seemed upon her part to have a presentiment of the evil that awaited her, sate down as requested in the hall, whilst my father considered his proposition. Upon the whole, it seemed to us kindest to the parties concerned, the widow King, Tom, and Chloe, to accept the gift. Sir John was a kind man, and a good landlord, but he was also a keen sportsman; and it was quite certain that he would have no great taste for a dog of such high sporting blood close to his best preserves; the keeper also would probably seize hold of such a neighbour as a scapegoat, in case of any deficiency in the number of hares and pheasants; and then their great enemy, Mr. Poulton, might avail himself of some technical deficiency to bring Mrs. King within the clutch of a surcharge. There might not always be an oversight in that Shylock's bond, nor a wise judge, young or old, to detect it if there were. So that, upon due consideration, my father (determined, of course, to make a proper return for the present) agreed to consider Chloe as his own property; and Tom, having seen her very comfortably installed in clean dry straw in a warm stable, and fed in a manner which gave a satisfactory specimen of her future diet, and being himself regaled with plum-cake and cherry brandy, (a liquor of which he had, he said, heard much talk, and which proved, as my father had augured, exceedingly cheering and consolatory in the moment of affliction,) departed in much better spirits than could have been expected after such a separation. I myself, duly appreciating the merits of Chloe, was a little jealous for my own noble Dash, whom she resembled, with a slight inferiority of size and colouring; much such a resemblance as Viola, I suppose, bore to Sebastian. But upon being reminded of the affinity between the two dogs, (for Dash came originally