"So do I," cried Beecroft. "I like 'em all. The man can't draw, but he can feel colour and big distances and lots and lots of air." Frederic began to feel better. The old men gathered round the drawings and gave grunts of satisfaction. (They had been very bored all the evening and were glad of something to interest them). "Where is he?" said Beecroft. "This brother of yours." "In Africa. He's coming home." "He's a genius. Do you know that? A genius." "Be careful, Beecroft," put in Lawrie. "There have been about twenty men of genius--real genius--in forty, or is it sixty?--thousand years." "A genius," reiterated Beecroft. "We'll give a show. You can ram him down their throats week by week, Yeo." "It's no good running a genius in this place," growled Lawrie.--He was always discovering poets and seeing them go to ruin.--"They don't want genius. They're so used to imitations." "At any rate," protested Beecroft, "they haven't had anything like this for years, and I don't think we ought to let 'em off." "My brother's coming home now. I'll tell him what you said. It's rather funny. I haven't seen him since we were boys, and then he was much older than I." "We'll have a show," repeated Beecroft. "He's a local man?" "We weren't born here. But my father's been rector of St. Paul's, Bide Street, for some years now." "That's good enough. The stinking rotters here like to think they've had a hand in anything produced in the place--if people talk about it enough. Have some more whiskey?" Frederic was beyond saying "no." The drink went to his head, inflated him, and he offered to sing. Strutt played his accompaniments, and they kept him at it for an hour until he was hoarse, and they shouted the choruses in cracked, beery voices. It was very late when Frederic left the club, after shaking hands all round and promising tearfully to bring his brother, the genius, as soon as he arrived. He forgot the drawings altogether, and old Lawrie, being the soberest of the party, gathered them together and took them home with him. VIII SERGE _It's a queer place, and indeed I don't know the place that isn't._ THE ARAN ISLANDS. SERGE FOLYAT landed at Plymouth on a wet autumn day and walked to St. Withans rejoicing and declaring in his heart that England was the most beautiful country in the world. He saw no reason to alter his opinion as he walked north until he came to the outcrop of industrialism in the plain of Cheshire.