treet, and the
wise, educated English dog safe and quite silent on the pavement if his
fool-mistress would but cease from trying to save him, passed and
repassed us in sunlit or shaded settings. But Mr. Lingnam only talked.
He talked--we all sat together behind so that we could not escape
him--and he talked above the worn gears and a certain maddening swish of
one badly patched tire--_and_ he talked of the Federation of the Empire
against all conceivable dangers except himself. Yet I was neither
brutally rude like Penfentenyou, nor swooningly bored like the
Agent-General. I remembered a certain Joseph Finsbury who delighted the
Tregonwell Arms on the borders of the New Forest with nine'--it should
have been ten--'versions of a single income of two hundred pounds'
placing the imaginary person in--but I could not recall the list of
towns further than 'London, Paris, Bagdad, and Spitsbergen.' This last I
must have murmured aloud, for the Agent-General suddenly became human
and went on: 'Bussorah, Heligoland, and the Scilly Islands--'

'What?' growled Penfentenyou.

'Nothing,' said the Agent-General, squeezing my hand affectionately.
'Only we have just found out that we are brothers.'

'Exactly,' said Mr. Lingnam. 'That's what I've been trying to lead up
to. We're _all_ brothers. D'you realise that fifteen years ago such a
conversation as we're having would have been unthinkable? The Empire
wouldn't have been ripe for it. To go back, even ten years--'

'I've got it,' cried the Agent-General. '"Brighton, Cincinnati, and
Nijni-Novgorod!" God bless R.L.S.! Go on, Uncle Joseph. I can endure
much now.'

Mr. Lingnam went on like our shandrydan, slowly and loudly. He admitted
that a man obsessed with a Central Idea--and, after all, the only thing
that mattered was the Idea--might become a bore, but the World's Work,
he pointed out, had been done by bores. So he laid his bones down to
that work till we abandoned ourselves to the passage of time and the
Mercy of Allah, Who Alone closes the Mouths of His Prophets. And we
wasted more than fifty miles of summer's vivid own England upon him
the while.

About two o'clock we topped Sumtner Rising and looked down on the
village of Sumtner Barton, which lies just across a single railway line,
spanned by a red brick bridge. The thick, thunderous June airs brought
us gusts of melody from a giddy-go-round steam-organ in full blast near
the pond on the village green. Drums, too, thumped