“Perhaps Mr. Spears would come too?” said Alice. And before he knew what was going to happen, he found himself pushed into the front seat of the carriage, which was like a Noah’s ark, with hampers and children. Never had this man of the people, this popular orator, occupied so strange a position. He had never known before what it was to roll luxuriously along the roads, to share in the ease and dignity of wealth. He took notes of it, like a man in a foreign country, and observed keenly all that took place--the manners of the people for whom the world was made: that was how they seemed to take it. The world was made for them. It was not a subject of arrogant satisfaction on their part, or pride in their universal dominion; they took it quite easily, gently, as a matter of course. My lady gave her orders with a gentle confidence in the obedience of everybody she addressed. It was all wonderful to the man who knew only the other side of the question. He asked about everything--the game (with an eye to the poachers); the great extent of the park (as bearing upon one of his favourite points--the abstraction from the public of so many acres which might have cultivation); and was answered with a perfect absence of all sense of guilt, which was very strange to him. They did not know they were doing wrong, these rich people. They told him all about it, simply, smilingly, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. All this went against his preconceived notions, just as the manners of a foreign country so often go against the idea you have formed of them. He had all his senses keenly about him, and yet everything was so novel and surprising that he felt scarcely able to trust to his own impressions. It was the strangest position surely in which a popular agitator, a preacher of democracy and revolution, a special pleader against the rich, ever was. “We have not many neighbours,” Lady Markham said. “That is Lord Westland’s property beyond the church. You can see Westland Towers from the turn of the road. And there are the Trevors on the other side of the parish.” “A whole parish,” said Spears, “divided amongst three families.” “The Trevors have very little,” said Lady Markham. “Sir William is the chief proprietor. But they are a very good family. Admiral Trevor--you must have heard of him--was once a popular hero. He did a great many daring things I have heard, but fame gets forgotten like other things. He lives very quietly now, an old man----” “The oldest man that ever was,” said Alice. “Fancy, it was in Napoleon’s time he was so famous--the great Napoleon--before even _old_ people were born.” “Before I was born,” said Lady Markham, with her soft laugh; “that is something like saying before the Flood. Then there is the vicar, of course, and a few people of less importance. It is easy to go over a country neighbourhood.”