as, catching sight of the chaise, they ran towards the house, opened the
gates, and dropping a courtesy to the ground, seemed to wish that she
could drop into it altogether; so frightened and so trembling seemed she
to shrink from the wrathful face which the master now put out of the
window.

"Did I tell you, or did I not," said Dick, "that I would not have those
horrid, disreputable cubs of yours playing just before my lodge gates?"

"Please, sir--"

"Don't answer me. And did I tell you, or did I not, that the next time I
saw you making a drying-ground of my lilacs, you should go out, neck and
crop--"

"Oh, please, sir--"

"You leave my lodge next Saturday! drive on, boy. The ingratitude and
insolence of those common people are disgraceful to human nature,"
muttered Richard, with an accent of the bitterest misanthropy.

The chaise wheeled along the smoothest and freshest of gravel roads, and
through fields of the finest land, in the highest state of cultivation.
Rapid as was Leonard's survey, his rural eye detected the signs of a
master in the art agronomial. Hitherto he had considered the squire's
model farm as the nearest approach to good husbandry he had seen; for
Jackeymo's finer skill was developed rather on the minute scale of
market-gardening than what can fairly be called husbandry. But the
squire's farm was degraded by many old-fashioned notions, and concessions
to the whim of the eye, which would not be found in model farms