man I've ever met seems to have an ambition to
own a house and lot in Loamshire or Hants or Salop or somewhere.
Their one object in life is to make some money and "buy back the old
place"--which was sold, of course, at the end of act one to pay the
heir's gambling debts.

Mr. Faucitt, when he was a small boy, used to live in a little village
in Gloucestershire, near a place called Cirencester--at least, it isn't:
it's called Cissister, which I bet you didn't know--and after forgetting
about it for fifty years, he has suddenly been bitten by the desire to
end his days there, surrounded by pigs and chickens. He took me down to
see the place the other day. Oh, Ginger, this English country! Why any
of you ever live in towns I can't think. Old, old grey stone houses with
yellow haystacks and lovely squelchy muddy lanes and great fat trees and
blue hills in the distance. The peace of it! If ever I sell my soul, I
shall insist on the devil giving me at least forty years in some English
country place in exchange.

Perhaps you will think from all this that I am too much occupied to
remember your existence. Just to show how interested I am in you, let
me tell you that, when I was reading the paper a week ago, I happened to
see the headline, "International Match." It didn't seem to mean anything
at first, and then I suddenly recollected. This was the thing you had
once been a snip for! So I went down to a place called Twickenham, where
this football game was to be, to see the sort of thing you used to do
before I took charge of you and made you a respectable right-hand man.
There was an enormous crowd there, and I was nearly squeezed to death,
but I bore it for your sake. I found out that the English team were the
ones wearing white shirts, and that the ones in red were the Welsh. I
said to the man next to me, after he had finished yelling himself
black in the face, "Could you kindly inform me which is the English
scrum-half?" And just at that moment the players came quite near where
I was, and about a dozen assassins in red hurled themselves violently
on top of a meek-looking little fellow who had just fallen on the ball.
Ginger, you are well out of it! That was the scrum-half, and I gathered
that that sort of thing was a mere commonplace in his existence.
Stopping a rush, it is called, and he is expected to do it all the time.
The idea of you ever going in for such brutal sports! You thank your
stars that you are safe on your l