a great measure lose its taste for outdoor sports of the primal order. The English are losing that taste at a rate which can leave no doubt as to the ultimate upshot. In brief, the Englishman as sportsman worth the name seems to be disappearing; and in his place England will have the adipose, plethoric, mechanical slayer of birds who goes to his shoot in a bath-chair, and the cadaverous, undersized, Saturday-afternoon zealot, the chief joys of whose existence are the cracking of filberts and the kicking of umpires. CHAPTER III THE MAN OF BUSINESS The English, all the world has heard, are a nation of shopkeepers. They are understood to keep shop and to glory in it. They have kept shop, with the other nations for customers, ever since international shopkeeping became a possibility. In the beginning, one is afraid, their notion of shopkeeping ran neither to fair trade nor honest dealing; but gradually there was built up a system of commercial equity, the main principle of which was the protection of one shopkeeper against another and the security of shopkeepers generally. In course of time the English man of business arose. He had a silk hat and expansive manners. He lived in a suburb and read the _Times_ on his way to business in the morning. All day at his office he would cheat no man, and his word was as good as his bond. His office day was a day of quite ten hours, and during those ten hours he sweated like the proverbial nigger. At nights he retired to his suburb, and, with the wife and children whom he kept there, ate to repletion from the joint, washed it down with sherry and port supplied to him by merchants of the type of the late Mr. Ruskin's father; and, hey, presto! by eleven of the clock he was deep among the feathers. Twice on Sundays he went to church and held the plate. To Sunday's midday dinner he invited the vicar or a curate, and there was always beef and batter-pudding and improving talk, not to mention cabbage and an extra special "glass of wine, sir." Other recreations the English man of business had none, save and except perhaps an occasional Saturday-afternoon drive in a hired chaise with Mrs. Man-of-Business and the children, and a still more occasional visit to the theatre. In the long run, by the practice of these virtues he amassed wealth. He put his money into good bottoms; he owed no man a penny; and as he never robbed anybody and always lived miles within his income, he had a conscience so easy that it seemed to sleep. Everybody respected him. He was in demand to take the chair at the meetings of young men's improvement societies, and to explain the secret of his success "free, gratis, and for nothing" to the callow young men thereat assembled. He would tell you unctuously that he attributed his success (1) to early rising, (2) to never wasting time [the split infinitive was his], (3) to always saving at least one third of his income, (4) to never going bond for anybody, and (5) to marrying Mrs.