It would make you laugh to see Emma and her mother fitting up pig-sties and hencoops, and already the Canal is enlivened with ducks, and the cock is strutting with his hens about the walks." As time passed, Sir William did not realize the comfort he had anticipated from surroundings so pleasant as those he described.

He was troubled in money matters, fearing lest he might be distressed to meet the current expenses of the house.

"If we had given up the house in Piccadilly," he lamented to Greville, "the living here would indeed be a great saving; but, as it is, we spend neither more nor less than we did." Why he did not give it up does not appear.

As Lady Paramount over the owner of the place, Lady Hamilton insisted upon entertaining to a degree consonant to the taste neither of Lord Nelson, who was only too pleased to humor her whims, nor of her husband, who had an old man's longing for quiet, and, besides, was not pleased to find himself relegated to a place in her consideration quite secondary to that of his host.

"It is but reasonable," he wrote to Greville, in January, 1802, "after having fagged all my life, that my last days should pass off comfortably and quietly.