Foxholme Hall, and Other Tales

We had our choice given us whether we would spend our Christmas holidays with our most kind and estimable old relative, our mother’s cousin, Miss Gillespie, in Russell-square, and go to the theatre and panoramas, and other highly edifying entertainments, or at Foxholme, in the New Forest, with our great uncle, Sir Hugh Worsley. “Foxholme for ever, I should think indeed!” exclaimed my brother Jack, making a face which was not complimentary to Cousin Barbara. “But she is a good kind old soul, if she wasn’t so pokerish and prim; and that was a dead-alive fortnight we spent with her two winters ago. I say Foxholme for ever.”
“Foxholme for ever,” I repeated. “Of course there couldn’t be the thinnest slice of a shadow of doubt about the matter. There’ll be Cousin Peter, and Julia, and Tom and Ned Oxenberry, and Sam Barnby, and Ponto, and Hector, and Beauty, and Polly; and there’ll be hunting, and shooting, and skating, if there’s a frost—and of course there will be a frost—and, oh, it will be such jolly fun!”
A few weeks after this we were bowling along the road to Southampton on the top of the old Telegraph, driven by Taylor—as fine a specimen of a Jehu as ever took whip in hand—with four white horses—a team of which he was justly proud. I see him now before me, his fine tall figure, truly Roman nose, and eagle eye, looking as fit to command an army as to drive a coach, with his white great-coat buttoned well up to his gay-coloured handkerchief, a flower of some sort decking his breast, a broad-brimmed beaver of white or grey, and a whip which looked as if it had just come from the maker’s hands—indeed, everything about him was polished, from the crown of his hat to his well-fitting boots; and I believe that no accident ever happened to the coach he drove. There was the Independent, also a first-rate coach, and, in those days, Collier’s old coach, which carried six inside, in which we once made a journey—that is, Jack and I—with four old ladies who ate apples and drank gin, with the windows up, all the way, and talked about things which seemed to interest them very much, but which soon sent us to sleep.