e paid no attention to the
board.

The next thing my friend did was to have a fine strong paling put all
round the wood in March, 1894. This paling was of oak; it was seven feet
high; it had iron spikes along the top. There were six gates in it, and
stout posts at intervals of ten yards. The boards overlapped very
exactly. It was as good a bit of work as ever I saw. He had it
varnished, and it looked splendid. All this took two years.

Just then he was elected to Parliament, not for Berkshire, as you might
have imagined, but for a slum division of Birmingham. He was very proud
of this, and quite rightly too. He said: "I am the one Conservative
member in the Midlands." It almost made him forget about his wood. He
shut up the Berkshire place and took a house in town, and as he could
not afford Mayfair, and did not understand such things very well, the
house he took was an enormous empty house in Bayswater, and he had no
peace until he gave it up for a set of rooms off Piccadilly; and then
his mother thought that looked so odd that he did the right thing, and
got into a nice old-fashioned furnished house in Westminster,
overlooking the Green Park.

But all this cost him a mint of money, and politics made him angrier and
angrier. They never let him speak, and they made him vote for things he
thought perfectly detestable. Then he did speak, and as he was an honest
English gentleman the papers called him ridiculous names and said he had
no brains. So he just jolly well threw the whole thing up and went back
to Berkshire, and everybody welcomed him, and he did a thing he had
never done before: he put a flag up over his house to show he was at
home. Then he began to think of his wood again.

The very first time he rode out to look at it he found the paling had
given way in places from the fall of trees, and that some leaned inwards
and some outwards, and that one of the gates was off its hinges. There
were also two cows walking about in the wood, and what annoyed him most
of all, the iron spikes were rusty and the varnish had all gone rotten
and white and streaky on the palings. He spoke to the bailiff about
this, and hauled him out to look at it. The bailiff rubbed the varnish
with his finger, smelt it, and said that it had perished. He also said
there was no such thing as good varnish nowadays, and he added there
wasn't any varnish, not the very best, but wouldn't go like that with
rain and all. Mr. Hermann-Postlethwaite