England -- Description and travel; Europe -- Description and travel
Well, he got fonder and fonder of this wood, and kept on asking people
what he should do, and how one could make most use of it, and he worried
a good deal about it. He reads books about woods, and in the opening of
1891 he had down to stay with him for a few days a man called Churt, who
had made a great success with woods on the Warra-Warra. But Churt was a
vulgar fellow, and so Hermann-Postlethwaite's wife, Lady Gywnnys
Hermann-Postlethwaite, would not have him in the house again, which was
a bother. Her husband then rode over to see another man, and the upshot
of it was that he put up a great board saying "Trespassers in this wood
will be prosecuted," and it might as well not have been put up, for no
one ever went into the wood, not even from the little town, because it
was too far for them to walk, and, anyhow, they did not care for
walking. And as for the doctor's son, a boy of thirteen, who went in
there with an air-gun to shoot things, he paid no attention to the
board.
The next thing my friend did was to have a fine strong paling put all
round the wood in March, 1894. This paling was of oak; it was seven feet
high; it had iron spikes along the top. There were six gates in it, and
stout posts at intervals of ten yards. The boards overlapped very
exactly. It was as good a bit of work as ever I saw. He had it
varnished, and it looked splendid. All this took two years.
Just then he was elected to Parliament, not for Berkshire, as you might
have imagined, but for a slum division of Birmingham. He was very proud
of this, and quite rightly too. He said: "I am the one Conservative
member in the Midlands." It almost made him forget about his wood. He
shut up the Berkshire place and took a house in town, and as he could
not afford Mayfair, and did not understand such things very well, the
house he took was an enormous empty house in Bayswater, and he had no
peace until he gave it up for a set of rooms off Piccadilly; and then
his mother thought that looked so odd that he did the right thing, and
got into a nice old-fashioned furnished house in Westminster,
overlooking the Green Park.
But all this cost him a mint of money, and politics made him angrier and
angrier. They never let him speak, and they made him vote for things he
thought perfectly detestable. Then he did speak, and as he was an honest
English gentleman the papers called him ridiculous names and said he had
no brains. So he just jolly well threw the whole thing up and went back
to Berkshire, and everybody welcomed him, and he did a thing he had
never done before: he put a flag up over his house to show he was at
home. Then he began to think of his wood again.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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