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Rh entertaining. The farmer had an idea that he was musical (he once brought us the church choir, whom he had been training to sing the chorus of 'John Peel' to his solo), and he invariably asked all the local musical talent available. The result was curious in the extreme, for the locals attempted the highest flights, and it used to be a most difficult matter to keep one's countenance when a burly Northumbrian farmer was shouting out in broadest unshackled Doric some such songs as 'When other lips,' or 'Come into the garden, Maud.' The hunting songs went well, but they only came after we had had a dose of the sentimental, and by the musical farmer were evidently thought to be very poor stuff. There was a wonderful speechmaker, too, a lanky village schoolmaster in a tall hat, who used to see the sport on a very small pony, and give us his ideas on what had occurred in an after-dinner speech. He had the most extraordinary flow of language and quotation that I ever knew any man to be possessed of, and was very great in chaff, the parson being his especial butt. How such a man ever came to be wasting his sweetness in a tiny Northumbrian hamlet, a dozen miles from a railway, was always a mystery to us; but there he was, and is to this day as far as I know, for not long since I received from him a tiny