it could not fail to
attract attention. The beard would have been a kind of counterblast to
the Rhodes hat. An appropriate counterblast; for the Rhodesian power in
Africa is only an external thing, placed upon the top like a hat; the
Dutch power and tradition is a thing rooted and growing like a beard;
we have shaved it, and it is growing again. The Kruger beard would
represent time and the natural processes. You cannot grow a beard in a
moment of passion.

.....

After making this proposal to my friends I hurriedly left town. I went
down to a West Country place where there was shortly afterwards an
election, at which I enjoyed myself very much canvassing for the Liberal
candidate. The extraordinary thing was that he got in. I sometimes lie
awake at night and meditate upon that mystery; but it must not detain us
now. The rather singular incident which happened to me then, and which
some recent events have recalled to me, happened while the canvassing
was still going on. It was a burning blue day, and the warm sunshine,
settling everywhere on the high hedges and the low hills, brought out
into a kind of heavy bloom that HUMANE quality of the landscape which,
as far as I know, only exists in England; that sense as if the bushes
and the roads were human, and had kindness like men; as if the tree were
a good giant with one wooden leg; as if the very line of palings were a
row of good-tempered gnomes. On one side of the white, sprawling road a
low hill or down showed but a little higher than the hedge, on the
other the land tumbled down into a valley that opened towards the Mendip
hills. The road was very erratic, for every true English road exists
in order to lead one a dance; and what could be more beautiful and
beneficent than a dance? At an abrupt turn of it I came upon a low white
building, with dark doors and dark shuttered windows, evidently not
inhabited and scarcely in the ordinary sense inhabitable--a thing more
like a toolhouse than a house of any other kind. Made idle by the heat,
I paused, and, taking a piece of red chalk out of my pocket, began
drawing aimlessly on the back door--drawing goblins and Mr. Chamberlain,
and finally the ideal Nationalist with the Kruger beard. The materials
did not permit of any delicate rendering of his noble and national
expansion of countenance (stoical and yet hopeful, full of tears for
man, and yet of an element of humour); but the hat was finely handled.
Just as I was addin