again, and then broke into a jolly laugh.
"No," it said; "I've really got to cut down this fence somehow; it's
spoiling all the plants, and no one else here can do it. But I'll only
carve another bit off the front door, and then come out and welcome
you."

And sure enough, he heaved up his weapon once more, and, hacking twice,
brought down another and similar strip of fence, making the opening
about fourteen feet wide in all. Then through this larger forest gateway
he came out into the evening light, with a chip of grey wood sticking to
his sword-blade.

He momentarily fulfilled all Fanshaw's fable of an old piratical
Admiral; though the details seemed afterwards to decompose into
accidents. For instance, he wore a broad-brimmed hat as protection
against the sun; but the front flap of it was turned up straight to the
sky, and the two corners pulled down lower than the ears, so that it
stood across his forehead in a crescent like the old cocked hat worn by
Nelson. He wore an ordinary dark-blue jacket, with nothing special about
the buttons, but the combination of it with white linen trousers somehow
had a sailorish look. He was tall and loose, and walked with a sort of
swagger, which was not a sailor's roll, and yet somehow suggested it;
and he held in his hand a short sabre which was like a navy cutlass, but
about twice as big. Under the bridge of the hat his eagle face looked
eager, all the more because it was not only clean-shaven, but without
eyebrows. It seemed almost as if all the hair had come off his face from
his thrusting it through a throng of elements. His eyes were prominent
and piercing. His colour was curiously attractive, while partly
tropical; it reminded one vaguely of a blood-orange. That is, that while
it was ruddy and sanguine, there was a yellow in it that was in no
way sickly, but seemed rather to glow like gold apples of the
Hesperides--Father Brown thought he had never seen a figure so
expressive of all the romances about the countries of the Sun.

When Fanshaw had presented his two friends to their host he fell again
into a tone of rallying the latter about his wreckage of the fence and
his apparent rage of profanity. The Admiral pooh-poohed it at first as
a piece of necessary but annoying garden work; but at length the ring of
real energy came back into his laughter, and he cried with a mixture of
impatience and good humour:

"Well, perhaps I do go at it a bit rabidly, and feel a kind of p