Page:Arminell, a social romance (1896).djvu/284

276 One or two parties arrived in hired conveyances. "Them's too poor to keep a carriage," was the observation with which they were saluted. The rector and Mrs. Cribbage came on foot. "These can't afford a cab. Curate and his old house-keeper, won't they eat!"

By far the most stylish and astonishing was the equipage of Sir Bosanquet Gammon, the new high sheriff. Sir Bosanquet was a north-country man who had made a large fortune as a civil engineer. He was never able altogether to shake off his native dialect and to speak as an educated English gentleman. This was the more singular, as he asserted that the family was originally De Gammon, and had Plantagenet blood in it. His coat-of-arms on carriage and yacht was a patchwork of quarterings. That Plantagenet blood and fifty heiresses should not by their fused gentility have prevented Gammon from talking with a north-country twang was something to shake the foundations of Anthropology.

Sir Bosanquet Gammon, being high sheriff, thought it incumbent on him to make a display, so he drove to Orleigh in a carriage with hammercloth, and powdered coachman and flunkeys.

Giraldus Cambrensis, in his "Topography of Ireland," says that in Meath, near Foure, are three lakes, each occupied by a special kind of fish, and he adds that, although these lakes are connected, the fish of each lake keep to themselves, and should they venture into the lake inhabited by the finny tribe of another species, they would be so like fish out of water, that they would die, unless indeed they precipitately retreated to their former habitation.

It also seemed at Orleigh this day that fish of three sorts were swimming about in three several ponds without association and amalgamation. Within the iron gates and rails were the red-fleshed salmon, by themselves, with interests in common, a common mode of speech, a common