ler came. He came in
perfectly cheerful and indescribably shabby. I asked him if Sir
Richard was up, and he said he had just gone down, and told me to my
amazement that it was twelve o'clock. I asked to be shown in to Sir
Richard at once. He was in his smoking-room. "Good morning," he said
cheerfully the moment I went in. I went directly to the matter in
hand. "I fear that I insulted some ladies in your house--" I began.

"You did indeed," he said, "You did indeed." And then he burst into
tears and took me by the hand. "How can I ever thank you?" he said to
me then. "We have been thirteen at table for thirty years and I never
dared to insult them because I had wronged them all, and now you have
done it and I know they will never dine here again." And for a long
time he still held my hand, and then he gave it a grip and a kind of a
shake which I took to mean "Goodbye" and I drew my hand away then and
left the house. And I found James in the stables with the hounds and
asked him how he had fared, and James, who is a man of very few words,
said he could not rightly remember, and I got my spurs from the butler
and climbed on to my horse and slowly we rode away from that queer old
house, and slowly we wended home, for the hounds were footsore but
happy and the horses were tired still. And when we recalled that the
hunting season was ended we turned our faces to Spring and thought of
the new things that try to replace the old. And that very year I
heard, and have often heard since, of dances and happier dinners at
Sir Richard Arlen's house.

The City on Mallington Moor

Besides the old shepherd at Lingwold whose habits render him
unreliable I am probably the only person that has ever seen the city
on Mallington Moor.

I had decided one year to do no London season; partly because of the
ugliness of the things in the shops, partly because of the unresisted
invasions of German bands, partly perhaps because some pet parrots in
the oblong where I lived had learned to imitate cab-whistles; but
chiefly because of late there had seized me in London a quite
unreasonable longing for large woods and waste spaces, while the very
thought of little valleys underneath copses full of bracken and
foxgloves was a torment to me and every summer in London the longing
grew worse till the thing was becoming intolerable. So I took a stick
and a knapsack and began walking northwards, starting at Tetherington
and sleeping at inns, where