farms. They live in
grand old mansions, surrounded with liveried servants, and inspire a
mild awe and respectful admiration, not only in the common country
people, but in the minds of persons in whom an American would not
look for such homage to untitled rank. They hunt with horses and
dogs over the grounds of their tenant farmers, and the latter often
act as game-beaters for them at their "shootings." When one of them
owns a whole village, church and all, he is generally called "the
Squire," but most of them are squired without the definite article.
They still boast of as good specimens of "the fine old English
gentleman" as the country can show; and I am inclined to think it is
not an unfounded pretension, although I have not yet come in contact
with many of the class.

One of this county squirocracy I know personally and well,--and
other Americans know him as well as myself,--who, though living in a
palace of his own, once occupied by an exiled French sovereign, is
just as simple and honest as a child in every feature of his
disposition and deportment. Every year he has a Festival in his
park, lasting two or three days. It is a kind of out-door
Parliament and a Greenwich Fair combined, as it would seem at first
sight to an incidental spectator. I do not believe anything in the
rest of the wide world could equal this gathering, for many peculiar
features of enjoyment. It is made up of both sexes and all ages and
conditions; especially of the laboring classes. They come out
strong on these occasions. The round and red faced boys and girls
of villages and hamlets for a great distance around look forward to
this annual frolic with exhilarating expectation. Never was romping
and racing and the amorous forfeit plays of the ring got up under
more favorable auspices, or with more pleasant surroundings. It
would do any man's heart good, who was ever a genuine boy, to see
the venerable squire and his lady presiding over a race between
competing couples of ploughmens' boys, from ten to fifteen years of
age, running their rounds in the park, bare-footed, bare-headed,
with faces as round and red as a ripe pumpkin, and hair of the same
color whipping the air as they neck-and-neck it in the middle of the
heat. When the winners of the prizes receive their rewards at his
hands, his kind words and the radiant benevolence of his face they
value more than the conquest and the coins they win.

Then there are intellectual e