He sits down in one of the clipped-yew-tree arbors to light a new cigar and smoke it peaceably. A peacock goes past him, drawing its beautiful train over the smooth-shaven grass. A mavis is singing on a rose-bough. The babble of a stream hidden under adjacent trees is pleasant on the morning silence. He doesn't notice any of it; he thinks it odiously hot, and what fools they were who clipped a yew-tree into the shape of a periwig, and what a beast of a row that trout-stream makes. Why don't they turn it, and send it farther from the house? He's got no money to do anything, or he would have it done to-morrow. A peacock begins to scream. The noise of a peacock cannot be said to be melodious or soothing at any time. "Why don't you wring that bird's neck?" he says savagely to a gardener's boy who is gathering up fallen rose-leaves. The boy gapes and touches his hair, his hat being already on the ground in sign of respect. The peacocks have been at Surrenden ever since Warren Hastings sent the first pair as a present to the Lady Usk of that generation, and they are regarded with a superstitious admiration by all the good Hampshire people who walk in the gardens of Surrenden or visit them on the public day. The Surrenden peacocks are as sacred to the neighborhood and the workpeople as ever was the green ibis in old Egypt. "How long will they touch their caps or pull their forelocks to us?" thinks Lord Usk; "though I don't see why they can reasonably object to do it as long as we take off our hats to Wales and say 'Sir' to him." This political problem suggests the coming elections to his mind: the coming elections are a disagreeable subject for meditation: why wasn't he born in his grandfather's time, when there were pocket boroughs as handy and portable as snuff-boxes, and the county returned Lord Usk's nominee as a matter of course without question? "Well, and what good men they got in those days," he thinks, "Fox, and Hervey, and Walpole, and Burke, and all the rest of 'em; fine orators, clever ministers, members that did the nation honor; every great noble sent up some fine fellow with breeding and brains; bunkum and bad logic and dropped aspirates had no kind of chance to get into the House in those days. Now, even when Boom's old enough to put up himself, I dare say there'll be some biscuit-baker or some pin-maker sent down by the Radical Caucus or the English Land League who'll make the poor devils believe that the millennium's coming in with them, and leave Boom nowhere!" The prospect is so shocking that he throws his cigar-end at the peacocks and gets up out of the evergreen periwig. As he does so he comes, to his absolute amazement, face to face with his friend Lord Brandolin. Lord Brandolin is supposed by all the world, or at least that large portion of it which is interested in his movements, to be at that moment in the forest-recesses of Lahore.