ple mistook for lounging until they walked
with him, and found that the pace was something over four miles an
hour. Add to these personal traits the fact that he had dwelt in
Roxton exactly two days and a half, and was already on speaking terms
with most of the inhabitants, and you have a fair notion of John
Trenholme's appearance and ways.

There remains but to add that he was commissioned by a magazine to
visit this old-world Hertfordshire village and depict some of its
beauties before a projected railway introduced the jerry-builder and a
sewerage scheme, and his presence in the White Horse Inn is explained.
He had sketched the straggling High Street, the green, the inn itself,
boasting a license six hundred years old, the undulating common, the
church with its lych gate, the ivy-clad ruin known as "The Castle,"
with its square Norman keep still frowning at an English countryside,
and there was left only an Elizabethan mansion, curiously misnamed
"The Towers," to be transferred to his portfolio. Here, oddly enough,
he had been rebuffed. A note to the owner, Mortimer Fenley, banker and
super City man, asking permission to enter the park of an afternoon,
had met with a curt refusal.

Trenholme, of course, was surprised, since he was paying the man a
rare compliment; he had expressed in the inn his full and free opinion
concerning all money grubbers, and the Fenley species thereof in
particular; whereupon the stout Eliza, who classed the Fenley family
as "rubbish," informed him that there was a right of way through the
park, and that from a certain point near a lake he could sketch the
grand old manor house to his heart's content, let the Fenleys and
their keepers scowl as they chose.

The village barber, too, bore out Eliza's statement.

"A rare old row there was in Roxton twenty year ago, when Fenley fust
kem here, an' tried to close the path," said the barber. "But we beat
him, we did, an' well he knows it. Not many folk use it nowadays,
'coss the artful ole dodger opened a new road to the station; but some
of us makes a point of strollin' that way on a Sunday afternoon, just
to look at the pheasants an' rabbits, an' it's a treat to see the head
keeper's face when we go through the lodge gates at the Easton end,
for that is the line the path takes."

Here followed a detailed description, for the Roxton barber, like
every other barber, could chatter like a magpie; it was in this wise
that Trenholme was able to d