ember that he may
possibly one day be plucked. And what remains? "Io," as Medea
says. . . . But Argemone?' . . . And Lancelot felt, for the
moment, as conservative as the tutelary genius of all special
constables.

As the last thought passed through his brain, Bracebridge's little
mustang slouched past the window, ridden (without a saddle) by a
horseman whom there was no mistaking for no one but the immaculate
colonel, the chevalier sans peur et sans reproche, dared to go about
the country 'such a figure.' A minute afterwards he walked in, in a
student's felt hat, a ragged heather-coloured coatee, and old white
'regulation drills,' shrunk half-way up his legs, a pair of
embroidered Indian mocassins, and an enormous meerschaum at his
button-hole.

'Where have you been this last week?'

'Over head and ears in Young England, till I fled to you for a
week's common sense. A glass of cider, for mercy's sake, "to take
the taste of it out of my mouth," as Bill Sykes has it.'

'Where have you been staying?'

'With young Lord Vieuxbois, among high art and painted glass, spade
farms, and model smell-traps, rubricalities and sanitary reforms,
and all other inventions, possible and impossible, for "stretching
the old formula to meet the new fact," as your favourite prophet
says.'

'Till the old formula cracks under the tension.'

'And cracks its devotees, too, I think. Here comes the cider!'

'But, my dear fellow, you must not laugh at all this. Young England
or Peelite, this is all right and noble. What a yet unspoken poetry
there is in that very sanitary reform! It is the great fact of the
age. We shall have men arise and write epics on it, when they have
learnt that "to the pure all things are pure," and that science and
usefulness contain a divine element, even in their lowest
appliances.'

'Write one yourself, and call it the Chadwickiad.'

'Why not?

'Smells and the Man I sing.

There's a beginning at once. Why don't YOU rather, with your
practical power, turn sanitary reformer--the only true soldier--and
conquer those real devils and "natural enemies" of Englishmen,
carbonic acid and sulphuretted hydrogen?'

'Ce n'est pas mon metier, my dear fellow. I am miserably behind the
age. People are getting so cursedly in earnest now-a-days, that I
shall have to bolt to the backwoods to amuse myself in peace; or
else sham dumb as the monkeys do, lest folks should find