ed one,' Penfentenyou objected.

'Yes. Paid for by me as a taxpayer,' I replied.

'And yours has a top, and the weather looks thundery,' said the
Agent-General. 'Ours hasn't a wind-screen. Even our goggles were hired.'

'I'll lend you goggles,' I said. 'My car is under repairs.'

The hireling who had looked to be returned to London spat and growled on
the drive. She was an open car, capable of some eighteen miles on the
flat, with tetanic gears and a perpetual palsy.

'It won't make the least difference,' sighed the Agent-General. 'He'll
only raise his voice. He did it all the way coming down.'

'I say,' said Penfentenyou suspiciously, 'what are you doing all this
_for_?'

'Love of the Empire,' I answered, as Mr. Lingnam tripped up in dust-coat
and binoculars. 'Now, Mr. Lingnam will tell us exactly what he wants to
see. He probably knows more about England than the rest of us put
together.'

'I read it up yesterday,' said Mr. Lingnam simply. While we stowed the
lunch-basket (one can never make too sure with a hired car) he outlined
a very pretty and instructive little day's run.

'You'll drive, of course?' said Penfentenyou to him. 'It's the only
thing you know anything about.'

This astonished me, for your greater Federationists are rarely
mechanicians, but Mr. Lingnam said he would prefer to be inside for the
present and enjoy our conversation.

Well settled on the back seat, he did not once lift his eyes to the
mellow landscape around him, or throw a word at the life of the English
road which to me is one renewed and unreasoned orgy of delight. The
mustard-coloured scouts of the Automobile Association; their natural
enemies, the unjust police; our natural enemies, the deliberate
market-day cattle, broadside-on at all corners, the bicycling
butcher-boy a furlong behind; road-engines that pulled giddy-go-rounds,
rifle galleries, and swings, and sucked snortingly from wayside ponds in
defiance of the notice-board; traction-engines, their trailers piled
high with road metal; uniformed village nurses, one per seven statute
miles, flitting by on their wheels; governess-carts full of pink
children jogging unconcernedly past roaring, brazen touring-cars; the
wayside rector with virgins in attendance, their faces screwed up
against our dust; motor-bicycles of every shape charging down at every
angle; red flags of rifle-ranges; detachments of dusty-putteed
Territorials; coveys of flagrant children playing in mid-s