plains and the sweltering humid heats of India, all
this coolness and greenness are like Paradise."

Brandolin laughs languidly.

"Hot! you ungrateful, untravelled country squire! I should like to
fasten you to a life-buoy in the middle of the Red Sea. Why do
Englishmen perspire in every pore the moment the thermometer's above
zero in their own land, and yet stand the tropics better than any other
Europeans?"

"You know I've sold Achnalorrie?" says his host, _a propos de rien_, but
to him Achnalorrie seems _a propos_ of everything in creation.

Brandolin is surprised, but he does not show any surprise. "Ah! Quite
right, too. If we wished to please the Radicals we couldn't find any way
to please them and injure ourselves equal to our insane fashion of
keeping hundreds of square acres at an enormous cost, only that for a
few weeks in the summer we may do to death some of the most innocent and
graceful of God's creatures."

"That's just the bosh Dolly talks."

"Lady Usk is a wise politician, then. Let her train Boom for
his political life. I don't know which is the more utterly
indefensible,--our enormous Highland deer-slaughter or our imbecile
butchery of birds. They ought to have recorded the introduction of
battue-shooting into the British Isles by the Great and Good on the
Albert Memorial."

"One must shoot something."

"I never saw why. But 'something' honestly found by a setter in stubble,
and three thousand head of game between five guns in a morning, are very
different things. What did they give you for Achnalorrie?"

Usk discourses of Achnalorrie with breathless eloquence, as of a lover
eulogizing the charms of a mistress forever lost to him.

Brandolin listens with admirable patience, and affects to agree that the
vision of the American crawling on his stomach over soaking heather in a
thick fog for eight hours after a "stag of ten" is a vision of such
unspeakably enviable bliss that it must harrow the innermost soul of the
dispossessed lord of the soil.

"And yet, do you know," he says, in conclusion, "I am such a degenerate
mortal, such an unworthy 'son of a gun,' that I would actually sooner be
sitting in these lovely, sunny, shady gardens, where one expects to see
all Spenser's knights coming through the green shadows towards one, than
I would be the buyer of Achnalorrie, even in the third week of August?"

"You say so, but you don't mean it," says the seller of Achnalorrie.

"I never say what