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Updated: June 2, 2025
Their course was invariably the same they would leave without notice; nor could any inducement be offered which would persuade them to remain. The Baron of Peddlington became, first round-shouldered, then deaf, and then insane in his search for a permanent cook, landing finally in an asylum, where he died, four years after the demise of his employer in London, of softening of the brain.
In truth, it had at least one merit from the woman's point of view it was decisively masculine. Whether Leo Ulford was, or was not, a blackguard; as Mrs. Trent had declared, did not matter to her. Three-quarters of the men she knew were blackguards according to the pinched ideas of Little Peddlington; and Mrs. Trent might originally have issued from there.
Under these circumstances it cannot be wondered at that when Monday, the opening day of the match which turned out beautifully fine for a wonder, as it always rained on the very slightest provocation at Little Peddlington arrived, there was such a crowd of carriages and drags, filled to their utmost capacity, as to astonish even the memory of that far-famed individual "the oldest inhabitant."
Even an ordinary contest, such as we sometimes indulged in with the Hammerton or Smithwick clubs, or the Bognor garrison, would have aroused considerable interest in the vicinity of Little Peddlington; but when it became known that we were going to play the celebrated Piccadilly Inimitables, who had licked Lancashire and Yorkshire, and almost every county eleven they had met in their cricketing tour from the north to the south of England, there was nothing else talked about from one end of our seaside town to the other, the news spreading to the adjacent hamlets, and villages beyond, until it reached the cathedral city twenty miles away.
De Herbert would have starved had it not been for his old friend Baron Bangletop, who offered him the post of private secretary, lately made vacant by the death of the Duke of Algeria, who had been the incumbent of that office for ten years, and in a short time the Baron of Peddlington was in full charge of the domestic arrangements of his friend.
I love the country, my dogs, my horses, the free fresh air, the stir and movement of life too well to pen myself up in a study and pore over blue-books, or to waste the summer evenings listening to the member for Little Peddlington laying down the law about combination drainage, or the proposed loop-line that is intended to connect his borough with the world in general.
The first cook to leave Bangletop under circumstances of a Gallic nature that is, without known cause, wages, or luggage had been employed by Fitzherbert Alexander, seventeenth Baron of Bangletop, through Charles Mortimor de Herbert, Baron Peddlington, formerly of Peddlington Manor at Dunwoodie-on-the-Hike, his private secretary, a handsome old gentleman of sixty-five, who had been deprived of his estates by the crown in 1629 because he was suspected of having inspired a comic broadside published in those troublous days, and directed against Charles the First, which had set all London in a roar.
But now that the great travelling team of the "Piccadilly Inimitables" purposed paying a passing visit to our rural shades, it of course behoved the Little Peddlington Cricket Club to challenge the celebrated amateurs to a match, albeit we were so woefully weak from the absence of many of our best members, or else be for ever disgraced amongst the patrons of the noble game.
For, after all, History herself is for the most part but the Muse of Little Peddlington, and Athens raised the heaviest crop of laurels yet recorded on a few acres of rock, without help from newspaper guano.
Equally certain was it that Baron Bangletop stormed and raved for two hours, ate a cold breakfast a thing he never had been known to do before and then departed for London to dine at the club until Peddlington had secured a successor to the departed cook, which the private secretary succeeded in doing within three days.
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