ays contented, and jolly as a sand-boy; but then in
his father's time there was no grouse-disease, no row about rents, no
wire fencing to lame your horses, no Ground Game Bill to corrupt your
farmers, no Leaseholder's Bills hanging over your London houses, no corn
imported from Arkansas and California, no Joe Chamberlain. When poor
Boom's turn comes, how will things be? Joe Chamberlain President,
perhaps, and Surrenden cut up into allotment-grounds.

He possesses two other very big places in adjacent counties, Orme Castle
and Denton Abbey, but they are ponderous, vast, gorgeous, ceremonious,
ugly: he detests both of them. Of Surrenden he is, on the contrary, as
fond as he can be of anything except the lost Achnalorrie and a little
cosey house that he has at Newmarket where the shadow of Lady Usk has
never fallen.

He hears the noise of wheels on gravel. It comes from the other side of
the house; it is his brake and his omnibus going down the avenue on
their way to the nearest railway-station, four miles off, to meet some
of his coming guests there. Well, there'll be nothing seen of them till
two o'clock at luncheon. They are all people he hates, or thinks he
hates, for that best of all possible reasons, that his wife likes them.
Why can't Dulcia Waverley come before the 20th? Lady Waverley always
amuses him, and agrees with him. It is so pleasant to be agreed with,
only when one's own people do so it makes one almost more angry than
when one is contradicted. When his wife agrees with him it leaves him
nothing to say. When Dulcia Waverley agrees with him it leaves him with
a soothing sense of being sympathized with and appreciated. Dulcia
Waverley always tells him that he might have been a great statesman if
he had chosen: as he always thinks so himself, the echo of his thoughts
is agreeable.

He sits down in one of the clipped-yew-tree arbors to light a new cigar
and smoke it peaceably. A peacock goes past him, drawing its beautiful
train over the smooth-shaven grass. A mavis is singing on a rose-bough.
The babble of a stream hidden under adjacent trees is pleasant on the
morning silence. He doesn't notice any of it; he thinks it odiously hot,
and what fools they were who clipped a yew-tree into the shape of a
periwig, and what a beast of a row that trout-stream makes. Why don't
they turn it, and send it farther from the house? He's got no money to
do anything, or he would have it done to-morrow.

A peacock begins t