ready, sir. They've bin
chasin' of them this half-hour back."

Ukridge groaned.

"Scoundrels! Demons!"

Beale went off.

"Millie, old girl," said Ukridge, adjusting the ginger-beer wire behind
his ears and hoisting up his grey flannel-trousers, which showed an
inclination to sag, "you'd better go indoors. I propose to speak pretty
chattily to these blighters, and in the heat of the moment one or two
expressions might occur to me which you would not like. It would hamper
me, your being here."

Mrs. Ukridge went into the house, and the vanguard of the audience
began to come on to the lawn. Several of them looked flushed and
dishevelled. I have a suspicion that Beale had shaken sobriety into
them. Charlie, I noticed, had a black eye.

They assembled on the lawn in the moonlight, and Ukridge, with his cap
well over his eyes and his mackintosh hanging round him like a Roman
toga, surveyed them sternly, and began his speech.

"You--you--you--you scoundrels! You blighters! You worms! You weeds!"

I always like to think of Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge as I saw
him at that moment. There have been times during a friendship of many
years when his conduct did not recommend itself to me. It has sometimes
happened that I have seen flaws in him. But on this occasion he was at
his best. He was eloquent. He dominated his audience. Long before he
had finished I was feeling relieved that he had thought of sending Mrs.
Ukridge indoors when he did, and Beale was hanging on his words with a
look in his eyes which I had never seen there before,--a look of
reverence, almost of awe, the look of a disciple who listens to a
master.

He poured scorn upon his hearers, and they quailed. He flung invective
at them, and they wilted. Strange oaths, learned among strange men on
cattle-ships or gleaned on the waterfronts of Buenos Ayres and San
Francisco, slid into the stream of his speech. It was hard, he said in
part, it was, upon his Sam, a little hard that a gentleman--a
gentleman, moreover, who had done so much to stimulate local trade with
large orders and what not--could not run up to London for five minutes
on business without having his private grounds turned upside down by a
gang of cattle-ship adjectived San Francisco substantives who behaved
as if the whole of the Buenos Ayres phrased place belonged to them. He
had intended to do well by them. He had meant to continue putting
business in their way, expanding their trade. But