it was
given, told more than a whole embrace from some other women. There
are ladies who always kiss their female friends, and always call them
"dear." In such cases one cannot but pity her who is so bekissed.
Mrs. Orme did not kiss Lady Mason, nor did she call her dear; but she
smiled sweetly as she uttered her greeting, and looked kindness out
of her marvellously blue eyes; and Lucius Mason, looking on over his
mother's shoulders, thought that he would like to have her for his
friend in spite of her rank. If Mrs. Orme would give him a lecture on
farming it might be possible to listen to it without contradiction;
but there was no chance for him in that respect. Mrs. Orme never gave
lectures to any one on any subject.

"So, Master Lucius, you have been to Liverpool, I hear," said Sir
Peregrine.

"Yes, sir--I returned yesterday."

"And what is the world doing at Liverpool?"

"The world is wide awake there, sir."

"Oh, no doubt; when the world has to make money it is always
wide awake. But men sometimes may be wide awake and yet make no
money;--may be wide awake, or at any rate think that they are so."

"Better that, Sir Peregrine, than wilfully go to sleep when there is
so much work to be done."

"A man when he's asleep does no harm," said Sir Peregrine.

"What a comfortable doctrine to think of when the servant comes with
the hot water at eight o'clock in the morning!" said his grandson.

"It is one that you study very constantly, I fear," said the old man,
who at this time was on excellent terms with his heir. There had
been no apparent hankering after rats since that last compact had
been made, and Peregrine had been doing great things with the H. H.;
winning golden opinions from all sorts of sportsmen, and earning a
great reputation for a certain young mare which had been bred by Sir
Peregrine himself. Foxes are vermin as well as rats, as Perry in his
wickedness had remarked; but a young man who can break an old one's
heart by a predilection for rat-catching may win it as absolutely
and irretrievably by prowess after a fox. Sir Peregrine had told to
four different neighbours how a fox had been run into, in the open,
near Alston, after twelve desperate miles, and how on that occasion
Peregrine had been in at the death with the huntsman and only one
other. "And the mare, you know, is only four years old and hardly
half trained," said Sir Peregrine, with great exultation. "The young
scamp, to have ridden her