desired to catch the post.

The Lord High Provost of North Kensington, who was a prosperous
draper, wrote a curt business note, like a man complaining of a
railway company, stating that definite inconvenience had been caused
him by the presence of the halberdiers, whom he had to take with him
everywhere. When attempting to catch an omnibus to the City, he had
found that while room could have been found for himself, the
halberdiers had a difficulty in getting in to the vehicle--believe
him, theirs faithfully.

The Lord High Provost of Shepherd's Bush said his wife did not like
men hanging round the kitchen.

The King was always delighted to listen to these grievances,
delivering lenient and kingly answers, but as he always insisted, as
the absolute _sine qua non_, that verbal complaints should be
presented to him with the fullest pomp of trumpets, plumes, and
halberds, only a few resolute spirits were prepared to run the
gauntlet of the little boys in the street.

Among these, however, was prominent the abrupt and business-like
gentleman who ruled North Kensington. And he had before long, occasion
to interview the King about a matter wider and even more urgent than
the problem of the halberdiers and the omnibus. This was the great
question which then and for long afterwards brought a stir to the
blood and a flush to the cheek of all the speculative builders and
house agents from Shepherd's Bush to the Marble Arch, and from
Westbourne Grove to High Street, Kensington. I refer to the great
affair of the improvements in Notting Hill. The scheme was conducted
chiefly by Mr. Buck, the abrupt North Kensington magnate, and by Mr.
Wilson, the Provost of Bayswater. A great thoroughfare was to be
driven through three boroughs, through West Kensington, North
Kensington and Notting Hill, opening at one end into Hammersmith
Broadway, and at the other into Westbourne Grove. The negotiations,
buyings, sellings, bullying and bribing took ten years, and by the end
of it Buck, who had conducted them almost single-handed, had proved
himself a man of the strongest type of material energy and material
diplomacy. And just as his splendid patience and more splendid
impatience had finally brought him victory, when workmen were already
demolishing houses and walls along the great line from Hammersmith, a
sudden obstacle appeared that had neither been reckoned with nor
dreamed of, a small and strange obstacle, which, like a speck of grit