“I say,” he said, “I think it is getting rather ridiculous. I’m not a revolutionist like you; quite the reverse. But all these rules and regulations are getting beyond all rational discipline. A little while ago they started forbidding all travelling menageries; not, mind you, stipulating for proper conditions for the animals, but forbidding them altogether for some nonsense about the safety of the public. There was a travelling circus stopped near Acton and another on the road to Reading. Crowds of village boys must never see a lion in their lives, because once in fifty years a lion has escaped and been caught again. But that’s nothing to what has happened since. Now, if you please, there is such mortal fear of infection that we are to leave the sick to suffer, just as if we were savages. You know those new hospital trains that were started to take patients from the hospitals down to the health resorts. Well, they’re not to run after all, it seems, lest by merely taking an invalid of any sort through the open country we should poison the four winds of heaven. If this nonsense goes on, I shall go as mad as Hilary himself.” Hilary Pierce had arrived during this conversation and sat listening to it with a rather curious smile. Somehow the more Hood looked at that smile the more it puzzled him; it puzzled him as much as the newspaper cutting in his hand. He caught himself looking from one to the other, and Pierce smiled in a still more irritating manner. “You don’t look so fierce and fanatical as when we last met, my young friend,” observed Owen Hood. “Have you got tired of pigs and police courts? These coercion acts the Colonel’s talking about would have roused you to lift the roof off once.” “Oh, I’m all against the new rules,” answered the young man coolly. “I’ve been very much against them; what you might call up against them. In fact, I’ve already broken all those new laws and a few more. Could you let me look at that cutting for a moment?” Hood handed it to him and he nodded, saying: “Yes; I was arrested for that.” “Arrested for what?” “Arrested for being a rich and respectable old lady,” answered Hilary Pierce; “but I managed to escape that time. It was a fine sight to see the old lady clear a hedge and skedaddle across a meadow.” Hood looked at him under bended brows and his mouth began to work. “But what’s all this about the old lady having a pug or a pet or something?” “Well, it was very nearly a pug,” said Pierce in a dispassionate manner. “I pointed out to everybody that it was, as it were, an approximate pug. I asked if it was just to punish me for a small mistake in spelling.” “I begin to understand,” said Hood. “You were again smuggling swine down to your precious Blue Boar, and thought you could rush the frontier in very rapid cars.”