“Don’t forget that Friday is the St. Leonards’ ‘At Home’ day. I’ve promised Janie that you shall be there in all your best clothes. (Don’t tell her I’m calling her Janie. It might offend her. But nobody calls her Miss St. Leonard.) Everybody is coming, and all the children are having their hair washed. You will have it all your own way down here. There’s no other celebrity till you get to Boss Croker, the Tammany man, the other side of Ilsley Downs. Artists they don’t count. The rumour was all round the place last week that you were here incognito in the person of a dismal-looking Johnny, staying at the ‘Fisherman’s Retreat,’ who used to sit all day in a punt up the backwater drinking whisky. It made me rather mad when I saw him. I suppose it was the whisky that suggested the idea to them. They have got the notion in these parts that a literary man is a sort of inspired tramp. A Mrs. Jaggerswade—or some such name—whom I met here on Sunday and who is coming on Friday, took me aside and asked me ‘what sort of things’ you said when you talked? She said she felt sure it would be so clever, and, herself, she was looking forward to it; but would I—‘quite between ourselves’—advise her to bring the children. “I say, you will have to talk seriously to Veronica. Country life seems to agree with her. She’s taken to poaching already—she and the twins. It was the one sin that hitherto they had never committed, and I fancy the old man was feeling proud of this. Luckily I caught them coming home—with ten dead rabbits strung on a pole, the twins carrying it between them on their shoulders, suggesting the picture of the spies returning from the promised land with that bunch of grapes—Veronica scouting on ahead with, every ten yards, her ear to the ground, listening for hostile footsteps. The thing that troubled her most was that she hadn’t heard me coming; she seemed to fear that something had gone wrong with the laws of Nature. They had found the whole collection hanging from a tree, and had persuaded themselves that Providence must have been expecting them. I insisted on their going back with me and showing me the tree, much to their disgust. And fortunately the keeper wasn’t about—they are men that love making a row. I talked some fine moral sentiment to her. But she says you have told her that it doesn’t matter whether you are good or bad, things happen to you just the same; and this being so she feels she may as well enjoy herself. I asked her why she never seemed able to enjoy herself being good—I believe if I’d always had a kid to bring up I’d have been a model chap myself by this time. Her answer was that she supposed she was born bad. I pointed out to her that was a reflection on you and Little Mother; and she answered she guessed she must be a ‘throw-back.’ Old Slee’s got a dog that ought to have been a fox-terrier, but isn’t, and he seems to have been explaining things to her.