It never occurs to them that they and their father's battue-shooting, pigeon-shooting, absenteeism, clubism, and general preference for every country except their own, may have had something to do with bringing about this impending cataclysm. That all the grand old houses standing empty, or let to strangers, among the rich Herefordshire pastures, the green Warwickshire woods, the red Devon uplands, the wild Westmoreland fells, may have also something to do with it, never occurs to them. That while they are flirting at Aix, wintering at Pau, throwing comfits at Rome, losing on the red at Monaco, touring in California, or yawning in Berlin, the demagogue's agents are whispering to the smock-frocks in the meadows, and pouring the gall of greed and hatred into the amber ale of the village pothouse, never occurs to them. If any one suggests it, they stare: "such a beastly climate, you know; nobody can stand it. Live in the country? Oh, Lord! who could live in the country?" And then they wonder that Mr. George has replaced Sir Roger de Coverley, and that Joseph Chamberlain's voice is heard instead of Edmund Burke's. Their host could kick them with a sensation of considerable satisfaction. Their neatness, smallness, and self-complacency irritate him excessively. The bloods of George the Fourth's time at least were men,--so he says. "You do these poor boys injustice," says Brandolin. "When they get out in a desert, or are left to roast and die under the equator, they put off all their affectations with their starched cambric, and are not altogether unworthy of their great-grandfathers. Britons are still bad ones to beat when the trial comes." "They must leave their constitutions at their clubs, then, and their nervous system in their hat-boxes," growls Usk. "If you are like those namby-pamby fellows when you are twenty, Boom, I'll put a bullet through your head myself," he says to his heir one morning, when that good-looking and high-spirited boy has come back from Suffolk. Boom laughs. He is a careless, high-spirited, extravagant lad, and he does not at present lean towards the masher type. Gordon is in his head; that is his idea of a man. The country had one hero in this century, and betrayed him, and honors his betrayer; but the hearts of the boys beat truer than that of the House of Commons and the New Electorate. They remember Gordon, with a noble, headlong, quixotic wish to go and do likewise. That one lonely figure standing out against the yellow light of the desert may perhaps be as a pharos to the youth of his nation, and save them from the shipwreck which is nigh. "Curious type, the young fellows," says Brandolin, musingly. "I don't think they will keep England what our fathers and grandfathers made it. I don't think they will, even if Chamberlain and Company will let them, which they certainly won't." "Tell you what it is," says Usk, "it all comes of having second horses hunting, and loaders behind you out shooting."