contempt, a little harder than he would have
done to an English colleague, and grumbling,
"I'll punch your 'ed after the fireworks, see if
I don't," submitted to be touched up by the
riding-master's whip, to thrust his hands into
the pockets of his pantaloons, turn in his toes,
make a grimace, and to propound, for the
seventeen-hundredth time, one of the seventeen
conundrums he had carefully studied from a jest-book,
bought at the stall, at the outset of his professional
career.

I think it was subsequently to the performance
of Herr Mooney, the spangled contortionist,
who achieved such fame through his desperate
efforts to swallow himself, that the celebrated
trick act of the Young Strangler, from the
Imperial Circus Samarcand, took place. Strangler
used to appear, you recollect, as a British sailor,
from which, by continual flinging off his outer
garments into the ring, he was successively
transformed into a parish beadle, Punch, a
Scottish Highlander, Massaroni the Brigand,
the Emperor Napoleon, and Cupid, God of Love.
It was just after Strangler's second recal, amid
thunders of applause at the close of his performance,
that the band, which had been contentedly
repeating, times and again, those good old
jog-trot airs traditional in all circuses I have ever
seen all over the world, and which seems to
have been expressly composed for horses to
canter to, addressed itself to a very slow and
almost lugubrious prelude. And then the heavy
curtains which veiled the entrance to the circus
from the stables were drawn aside, the barriers
were thrown open, and Madame Ernestine, in a
black velvet riding-habit, a shining beaver, a
silver grey veil, and waving an ivory-mounted
whip, made her appearance on her celebrated
trained steed— a magnificent, chestnut mare.

The high school of horsemanship required
some time to be appreciated. In the beginning,
it bored you somewhat. A long time elapsed
before it seemed to be coming to anything. At
first the movements of the trained steed induced
the belief that she had got a stone in her foot,
and was making stately but tedious efforts,
always to slow music, to paw the impediment
out. Then she slowly backed on to the edges
of the ring among the groundlings, causing the
women and children in the lower rows to shriek.
After that she reared up, until her fore-hoofs
seemed in dangerous proximity to the chandelier,
and her long sweeping tail lay almost on a
level with the dust of the arena. Then she
curvetted sideways; then she went through a
series of dignified steps, now approaching a
gavotte, and now offering some resemblance to
the menuet de la cour. Anon the musicians
struck up a livelier strain, and the trained steed
began to prance and to canter. The canter
broke into a gallop, interspersed with sudden
checks, with rigid halts, with renewed gallops,
with desperate plunges, and which concluded
with a terrific highflying leap over the barriers.
The audience shouted applause. The grooms
clambered on to the barriers, and held up
between them a scarf breast high. The trained
steed took it easily, and bounded back into the
ring. And then the music became soft and
solemn and subdued again, and the docile
creature subsided into gentle amblings, and almost
imperceptible gambadoes. Such was the high
school of horsemanship. It has been refined
since then, and the leap over the scarf left out;
but it still culminates in a sensation.

Sir William Long cared very little for the
high school of horsemanship; but he never took
his eyes off the horsewoman. She rode wonderfully
well. She was evidently very powerful of
hand, and had complete command (the which
she exercised unsparingly) over her horse; but
her movements were at the same time replete
with grace. She flinched not, she faltered not
when her charger was caracoling on a bias
perilously out of the centre of gravity. She and
the horse seemed one. She must have been
Lycus's sister.

She was, more certainly, the countess who
once used to live at the Hôtel Rataplan; the
once-handsome lady who had dined at
Greenwich, and taken Lily to be fitted out at Cutwig
and Co.'s, and had left the child at the
Marcassin's. She was the widow of Francis Blunt.
"Yes," William said to himself, " it was she."
Wofully changed in many respects she was; by
age, perchance, the least; but there were the
old traits; there was the old manner; and, at
the heat and height of her horse-tricks, when the
animal she rode was careering round the circle
at topmost speed, there were audible above the
sibillant slash of the whip on the poor beast's
flank, the cries by which she strove to excite
him to still further rapidity. And these were
the same tones which William Long had heard,
years ago, when the impetuous woman was
angry or excited.

She had more than reached middle age, and
her features, it was easy to see, had lost their
beauty. Beneath the paint and powder, they
must have been swollen or haggard, flushed or
sallow. You could not tell, in the glare of the
gaslight, the precise nature of the change which
had come over her, or how she would look by
day; but something told you that the change
was an awful one. Masses of superb hair there
still were, braided beneath her hat; but, psha!
is not superb hair to be bought at the barber's
for so much an ounce? But her eyes still
flashed, and her teeth were still white, and her
figure was still supple and stately.

Sir William Long waited until the high-
school act had come to a close; and then gently
woke up Lord Carlton. His lordship was good
enough to say that he had spent a most delightful
evening; but that he was afraid that the
claret was corked. He also inquired after
Thomas Tuttleshell, and being informed that
the excellent creature in question was below, in
the gardens, remarked that he dare say Tom was
looking up some supper. Which was the
precise truth. Thomas had fastened on a special
waiter, one whose civility was only equalled by
his sobriety— a combination of qualities somewhat
rare at Ranelagh, and at other places of