ing to the smock-frocks in the
meadows, and pouring the gall of greed and hatred into the amber ale of
the village pothouse, never occurs to them. If any one suggests it, they
stare: "such a beastly climate, you know; nobody can stand it. Live in
the country? Oh, Lord! who could live in the country?"

And then they wonder that Mr. George has replaced Sir Roger de Coverley,
and that Joseph Chamberlain's voice is heard instead of Edmund Burke's.

Their host could kick them with a sensation of considerable
satisfaction. Their neatness, smallness, and self-complacency irritate
him excessively. The bloods of George the Fourth's time at least were
men,--so he says.

"You do these poor boys injustice," says Brandolin. "When they get out
in a desert, or are left to roast and die under the equator, they put
off all their affectations with their starched cambric, and are not
altogether unworthy of their great-grandfathers. Britons are still bad
ones to beat when the trial comes."

"They must leave their constitutions at their clubs, then, and their
nervous system in their hat-boxes," growls Usk. "If you are like those
namby-pamby fellows when you are twenty, Boom, I'll put a bullet through
your head myself," he says to his heir one morning, when that
good-looking and high-spirited boy has come back from Suffolk.

Boom laughs. He is a careless, high-spirited, extravagant lad, and he
does not at present lean towards the masher type. Gordon is in his head;
that is his idea of a man. The country had one hero in this century, and
betrayed him, and honors his betrayer; but the hearts of the boys beat
truer than that of the House of Commons and the New Electorate. They
remember Gordon, with a noble, headlong, quixotic wish to go and do
likewise. That one lonely figure standing out against the yellow light
of the desert may perhaps be as a pharos to the youth of his nation, and
save them from the shipwreck which is nigh.

"Curious type, the young fellows," says Brandolin, musingly. "I don't
think they will keep England what our fathers and grandfathers made it.
I don't think they will, even if Chamberlain and Company will let them,
which they certainly won't."

"Tell you what it is," says Usk, "it all comes of having second horses
hunting, and loaders behind you out shooting."

"You confound cause and effect. The race wouldn't have come to second
horses and men to load if it hadn't degenerated. Second horses and men
to load indi