By his brave common sense, and lucid justice and eloquence, Fawcett had won this great battle for the people for all time. In his article in the _Fortnightly_, the following November, he says: ‘The few remaining commons are the only places where the people, except by sufferance, can leave the beaten pathway or the frequented high road.’ ‘And yet this Government, so grand in its popular professions, so strong in its hustings denunciations of those who would divorce the people from the soil, used the whole weight of official influence to enclose the few commons that were left.’ ’so anxious were they to pursue this policy of depriving the public and the poor of their commons that night after night the House was kept sitting to two or three o’clock in the morning in order to pass an Enclosure Bill,’ ‘and the Ministry, apparently willing to risk something more than reputation in the cause, were disastrously defeated by those who were anxious to preserve Epping Forest.’ The Ministry had come to stigmatise him as ‘impracticable.’ Yet the course which he obliged them against their will to follow was of vital importance to the country, and it seems as if the ‘impracticable’ Fawcett, the blind Don Quixote, had not tilted in vain at his opponents. CHAPTER XXI FOR THE PEOPLE’s WOODS AND STREAMS Saving the Forests—‘The monstrous Nation’—Walking with Lord Morley—The Boat Race—Safeguarding the Rivers. [Sidenote: The shearing of a Statesman.] Fawcett had the knack of saving time and getting the most out of it. One spring day when he was going to pay a promised visit, absent-mindedly he put his hand to his hair, which he found rather long. Discovering that he had five minutes to spare, he shouted in his cheerful loud voice to the cabby through the opening in the roof of the hansom: ‘stop at the first hairdresser’s shop.’ Arrived there he sprang out quickly and rushed in to the barber, exclaiming as he whizzed past him: ‘Cut off as much of my hair as you can in five minutes.’ Literally following these directions with zealous enthusiasm, the man quickly left his victim absolutely shorn to the skull, so that when Fawcett put on his hat it was far too large for him. A few minutes later he was shown into the drawing-room at the very minute of his appointment. He felt extremely embarrassed and sheepish coming in his despoiled condition, but his hostess, rising to meet him, exclaimed with as much tact as concealed surprise: ‘O Mr. Fawcett, what an improvement! I have never before been able to see the beautiful shape of your head.’ So the hostess tempered the wind to the shorn statesman. There was sufficient truth for art in her flattery, as Fawcett’s head was really of an unusually fine shape, massive, rugged—even beautiful. [Sidenote: He loved to be read to.]