o scream. The noise of a peacock cannot be said to be
melodious or soothing at any time.

"Why don't you wring that bird's neck?" he says savagely to a gardener's
boy who is gathering up fallen rose-leaves.

The boy gapes and touches his hair, his hat being already on the ground
in sign of respect. The peacocks have been at Surrenden ever since
Warren Hastings sent the first pair as a present to the Lady Usk of that
generation, and they are regarded with a superstitious admiration by all
the good Hampshire people who walk in the gardens of Surrenden or visit
them on the public day. The Surrenden peacocks are as sacred to the
neighborhood and the workpeople as ever was the green ibis in old Egypt.

"How long will they touch their caps or pull their forelocks to us?"
thinks Lord Usk; "though I don't see why they can reasonably object to
do it as long as we take off our hats to Wales and say 'Sir' to him."

This political problem suggests the coming elections to his mind: the
coming elections are a disagreeable subject for meditation: why wasn't
he born in his grandfather's time, when there were pocket boroughs as
handy and portable as snuff-boxes, and the county returned Lord Usk's
nominee as a matter of course without question?

"Well, and what good men they got in those days," he thinks, "Fox, and
Hervey, and Walpole, and Burke, and all the rest of 'em; fine orators,
clever ministers, members that did the nation honor; every great noble
sent up some fine fellow with breeding and brains; bunkum and bad logic
and dropped aspirates had no kind of chance to get into the House in
those days. Now, even when Boom's old enough to put up himself, I dare
say there'll be some biscuit-baker or some pin-maker sent down by the
Radical Caucus or the English Land League who'll make the poor devils
believe that the millennium's coming in with them, and leave Boom
nowhere!"

The prospect is so shocking that he throws his cigar-end at the peacocks
and gets up out of the evergreen periwig.

As he does so he comes, to his absolute amazement, face to face with his
friend Lord Brandolin.

Lord Brandolin is supposed by all the world, or at least that large
portion of it which is interested in his movements, to be at that moment
in the forest-recesses of Lahore.

"My dear George," says Lord Brandolin, in a very sweet voice, wholly
unlike the peacocks', "I venture to take you by surprise. I have left my
tub at Weymouth and come on foot