moment, unless 'tis the scaling of Plataea. Ever read
Thucydides?"

"No, sir."

"He's a nigger. He floored me at Brasenose: but I bear the old cock
no malice. Now you wouldn't think I was a University man, eh?"

"No, sir." I had not the least notion of his meaning.

"I am, though; and, what's more, I'm a Justice of the Peace and
Deputy-Lieutenant for the county of Cornwall. Ever heard of Jack
Rogers of Brynn?"

Once more I had to answer "No, sir."

"Then, excuse me, but where in thunder do you come from?" He halted
and confronted me in the path. This was a facer, for the words
"Justice of the Peace" had already set me quaking.

"If you please, sir, I'd rather not tell."

"No, I dare say not," he replied magisterially. "It's my fate to get
into these false positions. Now there was Josh Truscott of
Blowinghouse--Justice of the Peace and owned two thousand acres--what
you might call a neat little property. _He_ never allowed it to
interfere, and yet somehow he carried it off. Do I make myself
plain?"

"Not very, sir."

"Well, for instance, one day he was expecting company. There was a
fountain in the middle of the lawn at Blowinghouse, and a statue of
Hercules that his old father had brought home from Italy and planted
in the middle of it. Josh couldn't bear that statue--said the
muscles were all wrong. So, if you please, he takes it down, dresses
himself in nothing at all--same as you might be, bare as my palm--and
a Justice of the Peace, mind you--and stands himself in the middle of
the fountain, with all the guests arriving. Not an easy thing to
pass off, and it caused a scandal: but folks didn't seem to mind.
'It was Truscott's way,' they said: 'after all, he comes of a clever
family, and we hope his son will be better.' A man wants character
to carry off a thing like that."

I agreed that character must have been Mr. Truscott's secret.

"Now _I_ couldn't do that for the life of me," Mr. Rogers sighed, and
chuckled over another reminiscence. "Josh had a shindy once with a
groom. The fellow asked for a rise in wages. 'You couldn't have
said anything more hurtful to my feelings,' Josh told him, and
knocked him down. There was a hole in one of his orchards where
they'd been rooting up an old apple-tree. He put the fellow in that,
tilled him up to his neck in earth, and kept him there till he
apologised. Not at all an easy thing for a Justice of the Peace to
pass off: but, bless you, f