There was a notion current among competent authorities, that the physique and stamina of English men and women, especially in the large towns, were undergoing a gradual disastrous deterioration. If this were true and arrived at its natural culmination, the world might not fare the better for the lapse of that portion of the Anglo-Saxon race which had elected itself, in its more vigorous days, the pioneer of civilisation and the champion of liberty all over the world. Unadulterated food—which also inferred less craving for intoxicating drink—better lodging, legislation which should enact and compel freer space, purer air, fresher water, and the light of day, ought to do something to arrest the progress downwards. But the great hope, under God and his Son, lay in the recovery of true manliness and womanliness; to work—not dream—for the love of the work, and not for the wages alone; to be in the world as one who served with a will; to recognise fully that life did not consist of its lower gains, equally Philistine whether they belonged to a respectable bank-book or a disreputable betting-book. For when one came to the rank materialism of the things, it did not so much signify whether the object of desire and attainment implied being made secretary of state or mayor of Friarton, churchwarden of St. Philip’s or deacon of the chapel, or whether it descended to the lower level of the possibility of drinking champagne on occasions, as a variety on unlimited gin-and-water. Oliver was brought up short in his cogitations. He heard footsteps and voices approaching, and conjectured they belonged to two men whose figures in grey suits and wide-awakes he had seen ten minutes before, from the other side of the Mill, making their way through Copley Grange Park. He had remarked the new-comers particularly, since he had not heard that the Squire had come home, and visitors from that quarter proved comparatively rare when the family were not at Copley Grange. The Mill had to put up with the plague of its picturesqueness, and Oliver found himself called upon to display the good citizenship he so insisted upon, in giving up a portion of his privacy to render the picturesqueness public property. He did not come out of the ordeal without flaw. Certainly, he refrained from inaugurating his reign as many another good citizen has inaugurated his, by erecting barriers where his father had raised none. Oliver objected to calling his mill his castle, and defying anybody who was not on mill business, and with whom Oliver was not on speaking terms, from approaching its time-mellowed walls. Therefore he scouted Ted Green’s suggestion to keep a watch-dog, even on chain, and for the protection of the outlying sacks of wheat and flour.