It was during one of my Odysseys in connection with sport that I saw him again. He was growing fruit on a ranch in Vancouver Island. Nothing used to strike a young Englishman travelling in the Colonies more than the difference between what he saw and what all printed matter led him to expect. When I ran across Ruding in the club at Victoria and he invited me to stay with him, I expected rows of fine trees with large pears and apples hanging on them, a Colonial house with a broad verandah, and Ruding in ducks, among rifles and fishing rods, and spirited horses. What I found was a bare new wooden house, not yet painted, in a clearing of the heavy forest. His fruit trees had only just been planted, and he would be lucky if he got a crop within three years. He wore, not white ducks, but blue jeans, and worked about twelve hours a day, felling timber and clearing fresh ground. He had one horse to ride and drive, and got off for a day’s shooting or fishing about once a month. He had three Chinese boys working under him, and lived nearly as sparingly as they. He had been out of England eight years, and this was his second venture--the first in Southern California had failed after three years of drought. He would be all right for water here, he said; which seemed likely enough in a country whose rainfall is superior to that of England. “How the devil do you stand the loneliness?” I said. “Oh! one gets used to it. Besides, this isn’t lonely. Good Lord, no! You should see some places!” Living this sort of life, he yet seemed exactly what he used to be--in fact, he had kept his form. He didn’t precisely dress for dinner, but he washed. He had English papers sent out to him, and read Victorian poetry, and history natural and unnatural, in the evenings over his pipe. He shaved every day, had his cold tub every morning, and treated his Chinese boys just as he used to treat us new boys at school; so far as I could tell, they seemed to have for him much the feelings we used to have--a respect not amounting to fear, and a liking not quite rising to affection. “I couldn’t live here without a woman,” I said one evening. He sighed. “I don’t want to mess myself up with anything short of a wife; and I couldn’t ask a girl to marry me till the place is fit for her. This fruit-growing’s always a gamble at first.” “You’re an idealist,” I said. He seemed to shrink, and it occurred to me suddenly that if there were anything he hated, it would be a generalisation like that. But I was in a teasing mood. “You’re keeping up the prestige of the English gentleman.” His teeth gritted on his pipe-stem. “I’m dashed if I’m keeping up anything except my end; that’s quite enough.” “And exactly the same thing,” I murmured.