l concerning the ailments of belated July chickens.
Yeovil called to mind the station-master of a tiny railway town in
Siberia, who had held him in long and rather intelligent converse on the
poetical merits and demerits of Shelley, and he wondered what the result
would be if he were to engage the English official in a discussion on
Lermontoff--or for the matter of that, on Shelley. The temptation to
experiment was, however, removed by the arrival of a young groom, with
brown eyes and a friendly smile, who hurried into the station and took
Yeovil once more into a world where he was of fleeting importance.

In the roadway outside was a four-wheeled dogcart with a pair of the
famous Torywood blue roans. It was an agreeable variation in modern
locomotion to be met at a station with high-class horseflesh instead of
the ubiquitous motor, and the landscape was not of such a nature that one
wished to be whirled through it in a cloud of dust. After a quick spin
of some ten or fifteen minutes through twisting hedge-girt country roads,
the roans turned in at a wide gateway, and went with dancing, rhythmic
step along the park drive. The screen of oak-crowned upland suddenly
fell away and a grey sharp-cornered building came into view in a setting
of low growing beeches and dark pines. Torywood was not a stately,
reposeful-looking house; it lay amid the sleepy landscape like a couched
watchdog with pricked ears and wakeful eyes. Built somewhere about the
last years of Dutch William's reign, it had been a centre, ever since,
for the political life of the countryside; a storm centre of discontent
or a rallying ground for the well affected, as the circumstances of the
day might entail. On the stone-flagged terrace in front of the house,
with its quaint leaden figures of Diana pursuing a hound-pressed stag,
successive squires and lords of Torywood had walked to and fro with their
friends, watching the thunderclouds on the political horizon or the
shifting shadows on the sundial of political favour, tapping the
political barometer for indications of change, working out a party
campaign or arranging for the support of some national movement. To and
fro they had gone in their respective generations, men with the passion
for statecraft and political combat strong in their veins, and many oft-
recurring names had echoed under those wakeful-looking casements, names
spoken in anger or exultation, or murmured in fear and anxiety:
Bolingb