The impenetrability of this regulated life irritated him, and he strove to learn something of the human side of these people. He retired baffled, to be trained by his menials. In America, the native demoralises the English servant. In England, the servant educates the master. Wilton Sargent strove to learn all they taught as ardently as his father had striven to wreck, before capture, the railways of his native land; and it must have been some touch of the old bandit railway blood that bade him buy, for a song, Holt Hangars, whose forty-acre lawn, as every one knows, sweeps down in velvet to the quadruple tracks of the Great Buchonian Railway. Their trains flew by almost continuously, with a bee-like drone in the day and a flutter of strong wings at night. The son of Merton Sargent had good right to be interested in them. He owned controlling interests in several thousand miles of track,—not permanent way,—built on altogether different plans, where locomotives eternally whistled for grade-crossings, and parlor-cars of fabulous expense and unrestful design skated round curves that the Great Buchonian would have condemned as unsafe in a construction-line. From the edge of his lawn he could trace the chaired metals falling away, rigid as a bowstring, into the valley of the Prest, studded with the long perspective of the block signals, buttressed with stone, and carried, high above all possible risk, on a forty-foot embankment. Left to himself, he would have builded a private car, and kept it at the nearest railway-station, Amberley Royal, five miles away. But those into whose hands he had committed himself for his English training had little knowledge of railways and less of private cars. The one they knew was something that existed in the scheme of things for their convenience. The other they held to be “distinctly American”; and, with the versatility of his race, Wilton Sargent had set out to be just a little more English than the English. He succeeded to admiration. He learned not to redecorate Holt Hangars, though he warmed it; to leave his guests alone; to refrain from superfluous introductions; to abandon manners of which he had great store, and to hold fast by manner which can after labour be acquired. He learned to let other people, hired for the purpose, attend to the duties for which they were paid. He learned—this he got from a ditcher on the estate—that every man with whom he came in contact had his decreed position in the fabric of the realm, which position he would do well to consult. Last mystery of all, he learned to golf—well: and when an American knows the innermost meaning of “Don’t press, slow back, and keep your eye on the ball,” he is, for practical purposes, denationalised.