orace Pendyce, whom Horace Pendyce hated, yet could not quite
despise. "Always one like that in a hunting country!" A black dog on
the shoulders of his order. 'Post equitem sedet' Jaspar Bellew!

The Squire came out on the top of the rise, and all Worsted Scotton was
in sight. It was a sandy stretch of broom and gorse and heather, with a
few Scotch firs; it had no value at all, and he longed for it, as a boy
might long for the bite someone else had snatched out of his apple. It
distressed him lying there, his and yet not his, like a wife who was no
wife--as though Fortune were enjoying her at his expense. Thus was he
deprived of the fulness of his mental image; for as with all men, so with
the Squire, that which he loved and owned took definite form--a some
thing that he saw. Whenever the words "Worsted Skeynes" were in his
mind--and that was almost always--there rose before him an image defined
and concrete, however indescribable; and what ever this image was, he
knew that Worsted Scot ton spoiled it. It was true that he could not
think of any use to which to put the Common, but he felt deeply that it
was pure dog-in-the-mangerism of the cottagers, and this he could not
stand. Not one beast in two years had fattened on its barrenness. Three
old donkeys alone eked out the remnants of their days. A bundle of
firewood or old bracken, a few peat sods from one especial corner, were
all the selfish peasants gathered. But the cottagers were no great
matter--he could soon have settled them; it was that fellow Peacock whom
he could not settle, just because he happened to abut on the Common, and
his fathers had been nasty before him. Mr. Pendyce rode round looking at
the fence his father had put up, until he came to the portion that
Peacock's father had pulled down; and here, by a strange fatality--such
as will happen even in printed records--he came on Peacock himself
standing in the gap, as though he had foreseen this visit of the
Squire's. The mare stopped of her own accord, the spaniel John at a
measured distance lay down to think, and all those yards away he could be
heard doing it, and now and then swallowing his tongue.

Peacock stood with his hands in his breeches' pockets. An old straw hat
was on his head, his little eyes were turned towards the ground; and his
cob, which he had tied to what his father had left standing of the fence,
had his eyes, too, turned towards the ground, for he was eating grass.
Mr.