of ancient yew-trees on the crest of a hill.
Ashbourne stood high, and the view from the terrace was at all times
magnificent, but perhaps finest of all in the moonlight.

The younger guests wandered softly in and out of the rooms, and looked
at the golden oranges glimmering against their dark leaves, and put
themselves into positions that suggested the possibility of flirtation.
Young ladies whose study of German literature had never gone beyond
Ollendorff gazed pensively at the oranges, and murmured the song of
Mignon. Couples of maturer growth whispered the details of unsavoury
scandals behind perfumed fans.

Vixen and Rorie were among these roving couples. Violet had left the
piano, and Roderick was off duty. Lady Mabel and Lord Mallow were deep
in the wrongs of Ireland. Captain Winstanley was talking agriculture
with the Duke, whose mind was sorely exercised about guano.

"My dear sir, in a few years we shall have used up all the guano, and
then what can become of us?" demanded the Duke. "Talk about our
exhausting our coal! What is that compared with the exhaustion of
guano? We may learn to exist without fires. Our winters are becoming
milder; our young men are going in for athletics; they can keep
themselves warm upon bicycles. And then we have the gigantic
coal-fields of America, the vast basin of the Mississippi to fall back
upon, with ever-increasing facilities in the mode of transport. But
civilisation must come to a deadlock when we have no more guano. Our
grass, our turnips, our mangel, must deteriorate, We shall have no more
prize cattle. It is too awful to contemplate."

"But do you really consider such a calamity at all probable, Duke?"
asked the Captain.

"Probable, sir? It is inevitable. In 1868 the Chincha Islands were
estimated to contain about six million tons of guano. The rate of
exportation had at that time risen to four hundred thousand tons per
annum. At this rate the three islands will be completely exhausted by
the year 1888, and England will have to exist without guano. The glory
of the English people, as breeders of prize oxen, will have departed."

"Chemistry will have discovered new fertilisers by that time,"
suggested the Captain, in a comforting tone.

"Sir," replied the Duke severely, "the discoveries of modern science
tend to the chimerical rather than the practical. Your modern
scientists can liquefy oxygen, they can light a city with electricity,
but they cannot give me anyth