ly preserved, pheasants were fed on Indian
corn till they were the finest birds in the country, and in the little
winding paths of the elder and bilberry coverts thirty first-rate shots,
with two loading-men to each, could find flock and feather to amuse them
till dinner, with rocketers and warm corners enough to content the most
insatiate of knickerbockered gunners. The stud was superb; the cook, a
French artist of consummate genius, who had a brougham to his own use
and wore diamonds of the first water; in the broad beech-studded grassy
lands no lesser thing than doe and deer ever swept through the thick
ferns in the sunlight and the shadow; a retinue of powdered servants
filled the old halls, and guests of highest degree dined in its stately
banqueting room, with its scarlet and gold, its Vandykes and its
Vernets, and yet--there was terribly little money at Royallieu with it
all. Its present luxury was purchased at the cost of the future, and the
parasite of extravagance was constantly sapping, unseen, the gallant old
Norman-planted oak of the family-tree. But then, who thought of that?
Nobody. It was the way of the House never to take count of the morrow.
True, any one of them would have died a hundred deaths rather than have
had one acre of the beautiful green diadem of woods felled by the ax of
the timber contractor, or passed to the hands of a stranger; but no one
among them ever thought that this was the inevitable end to which they
surely drifted with blind and unthinking improvidence. The old
Viscount, haughtiest of haughty nobles, would never abate one jot of his
accustomed magnificence; and his sons had but imbibed the teaching of
all that surrounded them; they did but do in manhood what they had been
unconsciously molded to do in boyhood, when they were set to Eton at ten
with gold dressing-boxes to grace their Dame's tables, embryo Dukes for
their cofags, and tastes that already knew to a nicety the worth of
the champagnes at the Christopher. The old, old story--how it repeats
itself! Boys grow up amid profuse prodigality, and are launched into a
world where they can no more arrest themselves than the feather-weight
can pull in the lightning stride of the two-year-old, who defies all
check and takes the flat as he chooses. They are brought up like young
Dauphins, and tossed into the costly whirl to float as best they can--on
nothing. Then, on the lives and deaths that follow; on the graves where
a dishonored