for model-farming, you know." At the
hereditary "place in Lincolnshire" he had spent the bloom of his life,
which he now looked back upon with tender regrets. He did not mention
the fact that, at the age of five-and-twenty, he had been beguiled from
that Arcadia by wily persons who took advantage of his innocent youth,
who initiated him into the metropolitan mysteries which sadden the soul
and deplete the pocket, who finally abandoned him upon the shoal of a
youngest brother's allowance when his father passed away from the place
in Lincolnshire, and young Sir Grant, reigning in the old baronet's
stead, deemed himself generous in making the family scapegrace any
provision at all. Yet such were the outlines of Mr. Musselwhite's
history. Had he been the commonplace spendthrift, one knows pretty well
on what lines his subsequent life would have run; but poor Mr.
Musselwhite was at heart a domestic creature. Exiled from his home, he
wandered in melancholy, year after year, round a circle of continental
resorts, never seeking relief in dissipation, never discovering a
rational pursuit, imagining to himself that he atoned for the
disreputable past in keeping far from the track of his distinguished
relatives.

Ah, that place in Lincolnshire! To the listener's mind it became one of
the most imposing of English ancestral abodes. The house was of
indescribable magnitude and splendour. It had a remarkable "turret,"
whence, across many miles of plain, Lincoln Cathedral could be
discovered by the naked eye; it had an interminable drive from the
lodge to the stately portico; it had gardens of fabulous fertility; it
had stables which would have served a cavalry regiment In what region
were the kine of Sir Grant Musselwhite unknown to fame? Who had not
heard of his dairy-produce? Three stories was Mr. Musselwhite in the
habit or telling, scintillating fragments of his blissful youth; one
was of a fox-cub and a terrier; another of a heifer that went mad; the
third, and the most thrilling, of a dismissed coachman who turned
burglar, and in the dead of night fired shots at old Sir Grant and his
sons. In relating these anecdotes, his eye grew moist and his throat
swelled.

Mr. Musselwhite's place at table was next to Barbara Denyer. So long as
Miss Denyer was new, or comparatively new, to her neighbour's
reminiscences, all went well between them. Barbara condescended to show
interest in the place in Lincolnshire; she put pertinent questi