d
chosen the architect, supervised the plans, and seen to it that the
contractor used none but the best material. The school would compare with
any in the Duchy, and should have a teacher worthy of it--one to open the
children's eyes and proclaim and inculcate the doctrine of progress.
John Rosewarne was a patriot in his unemotional way. He hated the drift
of the rural population into the towns, foreseeing that it sapped the
strength of England. He despised it too; his own experience telling him
that a countryman might amass wealth if he had brains and used them.
As for the brainless herd, they should be kept on the land at all cost, to
grow strong, breed strong children, and, when the inevitable hour came, be
used as fighters to defend England's wealth.

He rode on pondering, past uplands where the larks sang and the mowers
whetted their scythes; down between honeysuckle-hedges to a small village
glassing itself in the head waters of a creek, asleep, since all its grown
inhabitants had climbed the hill to toil in the hay-harvest, and silent
but for a few clucking fowls and a murmur of voices within the infants'
school; thence across a bridge, and up and along a winding valley to the
park gates at Damelioc. Beyond these the valley narrowed to a sylvan
gorge, and the speckless carriage-road mounted under forest trees
alongside a river tumbling in miniature cascades, swirling under mossy
footbridges, here and there artfully delayed to form a trout-pool, or as
artfully veiled by thickets of trailing wild roses and Traveller's Joy.
For a mile and more he rode upward under soft green shadows, then lifted
his eyes to wide daylight as the coombe opened suddenly upon a noble
home-park, smooth as a lawn, rising in waves among the folds of the hills
to a high plateau whence Damelioc House looked seaward--a house of wide
prospect and in aspect stately, classical in plan, magnificently filling
the eye with its bold straight lines and ample symmetries prolonged in
terraces and rows of statues interset with pointed yews.

The mistress of this palace gave him audience as usual in her
blue-and-white morning-room, from the ceiling of which, from the centre of
a painting, "The Nuptials of Venus and Vulcan," her own youthful face
smiled down, her husband having for a whim instructed the painter to
depict the goddess in her likeness. It smiled down now on a little
shrunken lady huddled deep in an easy-chair. Only her dark eyes kept s