bourgeois black from wrist to ankle, achieving incredible improprieties. We were silent—Hinchcliffe and Pyecroft through professional appreciation; I with a layman’s delight in the expert; and our guest because of fear. At the edge of the evening she smelt the sea to southward and sheered thither like the strong-winged albatross, to circle enormously amid green flats fringed by martello towers. “Ain’t that Eastbourne yonder?” said our guest, reviving. “I’ve a aunt there—she’s cook to a J.P.—could identify me.” “Don’t worry her for a little thing like that,” said Pyecroft; and ere he had ceased to praise family love, our unpaid judiciary, and domestic service, the Downs rose between us and the sea, and the Long Man of Hillingdon lay out upon the turf. “Trevington—up yonder—is a fairly isolated little dorp,” I said, for I was beginning to feel hungry. “No,” said Kysh. “He’d get a lift to the railway in no time…. Besides, I’m enjoying myself…. Three pounds eighteen and sixpence. Infernal swindle!” I take it one of his more recent fines was rankling in Kysh’s brain; but he drove like the Archangel of the Twilight. About the longitude of Cassocks, Hinchcliffe yawned. “Aren’t we goin’ to maroon our Robert? I’m hungry, too.” “The commodore wants his money back,” I answered. “If he drives like this habitual, there must be a tidyish little lump owin’ to him,” said Pyecroft. “Well, I’m agreeable.” “I didn’t know it could be done. S’welp me, I didn’t,” our guest murmured. “But you will,” said Kysh. And that was the first and last time he addressed the man. We ran through Penfield Green, half stupefied with open air, drugged with the relentless boom of the Octopod, and extinct with famine. “I used to shoot about here,” said Kysh, a few miles further on. “Open that gate, please,” and he slowed as the sun touched the sky-line. At this point we left metalled roads and bucked vigorously amid ditches and under trees for twenty minutes. “Only cross-country car on the market,” he said, as we wheeled into a straw-yard where a lone bull bellowed defiance to our growlings. “Open that gate, please. I hope the cattle-bridge will stand up.” “I’ve took a few risks in my time,” said Pyecroft as timbers cracked beneath us and we entered between thickets, “but I’m a babe to this man, Hinch.” “Don’t talk to me. Watch _him!_ It’s a liberal education, as Shakespeare says. Fallen tree on the port bow, Sir.” “Right! That’s my mark. Sit tight!” She flung up her tail like a sounding whale and buried us in a fifteen-foot deep bridle-path buttressed with the exposed roots of enormous beeches. The wheels leaped from root to rounded boulder, and it was very dark in the shadow of the foliage. “There ought to be a hammer-pond somewhere about here.” Kysh was letting her down this chute in brakeful spasms. “Water dead ahead, Sir. Stack o’ brushwood on the starboard beam, and—no road,” sang Pyecroft.