and forest.

"I regard myself as only a temporary inhabitant," he said, "and shall be
well content if, when I am ready for another move, I can get as much for
the ground as I gave for it. In that way I shall have lived rent free
and shall have had my enjoyment for nothing, and, I have no doubt, a
pleasant time to look back upon."

"Do you never mean to settle down, Mr. Atherton?" Mrs. Mitford asked.

[Illustration: WILFRID AND THE GRIMSTONES FIND IT HARD WORK

_Page 197_]

"In the dim future I may do so," he replied. "I have been wandering ever
since I left college, some fifteen years ago. I return to London
periodically, spend a few weeks and occasionally a few months there,
enjoy the comforts of good living and club-life for a bit; then the
wandering fit seizes me and I am off again. Nature altogether made a
mistake in my case. I ought to have been a thin wiry sort of man, and in
that case I have no doubt I should have distinguished myself as an
African explorer or something of that sort. Unfortunately she placed my
restless spirit in an almost immovable frame of flesh, and the
consequence is the circle of my wandering is to a certain extent
limited."

"You make yourself out to be much stouter than you are, Mr. Atherton. Of
course you are stout, but not altogether out of proportion to your
height and width of shoulders. I think you put it on a good deal as an
excuse for laziness."

Mr. Atherton laughed. "Perhaps you are right, Mrs. Mitford, though my
weight is really a great drawback to my carrying out my views in regard
to travel. You see, I am practically debarred from travelling in
countries where the only means of locomotion is riding on horses. I
could not find animals in any foreign country that would carry me for
any distances. I might in England, I grant, find a weight-carrying cob
capable of conveying twenty stone along a good road, but I might search
all Asia in vain for such a horse, while as for Africa, it would take a
dozen natives to carry me in a hammock. No, I suppose I shall go on
wandering pretty nearly to the end of the chapter, and shall then settle
down in quiet lodgings somewhere in the region of Pall Mall."

Upon the day after his return from the inspection of the farm Wilfrid
wrote home to his father describing the location, and saying that he
thought it was the very thing to suit them. It would be a fortnight
before an answer could be received, and during that time he set to work
at