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‘There’s no sport more healthful, I verily believe,’ agreed the doctor.

‘And as for nat’ral history, what can a man want that he can’t larn off a fox? Five-an’-twenty years I’ve been at it, an’ the varmints be teachin’ me yet. But I’m forgettin’ my message, sir, which is that Sir John sends his compliments and would be happy to see you at dinner this evenin’, he havin’ a few friends.’

Doctor Unonius sighed. He had designed to spend the evening on his treatise. But he cherished a real regard for Sir John, whom all the countryside esteemed for a sportsman and an upright English gentleman; and Sir John, who, without learning of his own, held learning in exaggerated respect, cherished an equal regard for the doctor.

‘My compliments to your master. I will come with pleasure,’ said Doctor Unonius, thrusting Homer back in his shelf.

CHAPTER III.

‘Wunnerful brandy, Sir John!’ said old Squire Morshead.

He said this regularly as he dined at Penalune when, after dinner and wine and songs, the hour came for the ‘brandy-mixing’ before the guests dispersed. Sir John was a widower and confined his hospitality to men. He had adored his wife and lost her young; and thereafter, though exquisitely courteous to ladies when he met them– on the hunting-field, for example–he could not endure one within the walls of Penalune. As he put it to himself, quoting an old by-word, ‘What the eye don’t see the heart don’t grieve.’ It scarcely needs to be added that the heart did grieve; but this was his way, albeit a strange one, of worshipping what he had lost.

For the rest, he was a hale, cheerful, even jovial gentleman, now well past fifty; clear of eye, sound of wind and limb, standing six feet two in his stockings; fearing no man, on good terms with all, but liking his neighbours best, and no more eccentric than a country squire has the right, if not even the obligation to be. Unless it were in the saddle, you could scarcely see him to better advantage than at this ceremony of brandy-mixing–for a ceremony it was; no pushing of a decanter, but a slow solemn ladling by the host himself from an ample bowl. Moreover, the Penalune brandy was famous.

‘It has lain,’ said he–‘let me see–thirty-five years in cellar, to my own knowledge. My father never told me how or when he came by it. Smuggled, you may be sure.’

The talk ran on smuggling and its decline. A Mr St Aubyn, of Clowance, lamented this decline as symptomatic–‘the national fibre’s deteriorating, mark my words.’ A Mr Trelawny was disposed to agree with him. ‘And, after all,’ he said, ‘the game was a venial one; a kind of sport. Hang it, a Briton must be allowed his sporting instincts!’ ‘By the same argument, no doubt, you would justify poaching?’ put in Sir John, with a twinkle. Mr Trelawny would by no means allow this. ‘It would interest me, sir, to hear you define the moral difference between smuggling and poaching,’ said Doctor Unonius. ‘I don’t go in for definitions, sir,’ Mr Trelawny answered. ‘I’m a practical man and judge things by their results. Look at your Polpeor folk–smugglers all, or the sons of smugglers–a fine upstanding, independent lot as you would wish to see; whereas your poacher nine times out of ten is a sneak, and looks it.’ ‘Because,’ retorted the doctor, but gently, ‘your smuggler lives in his own cottage, serves no master, and has public opinion–by which I mean the only public opinion he knows, that of his neighbours–to back him; whereas your poacher lives by day in affected subservience to the landowner he robs by night, and because you take good care that public opinion is against him.’ ‘To be sure I do,’ affirmed Mr Trelawny, and would have continued the argument, but here old Squire Morshead struck in and damned the Government for its new coastguard service. ‘I don’t deny,’ he said, ‘it’s an improvement on anything we’ve seen yet under the Customs, or would be, if there was any real smuggling left to grapple with. But the “trade” has been dwindling now for these thirty years, and to invent this fire-new service to suppress what’s dying of its own accord is an infernal waste of public money.’ ‘I doubt,’ Sir John demurred, ‘if smuggling be quite so near death’s door as you fancy. Hey, doctor–in Polpeor now?’ The doctor opined that very little smuggling survived nowadays; the profits were not worth the risk. ‘Though, to be sure,’ he added, ‘public opinion in Polpeor is still with the trade. For an illustration, not a soul in the town will let the new coast-guardsmen a house to live in, and I hear the Government intends to send down a hulk from Plymouth Dock and moor it alongside the quay.’ He paused. ‘But,’ he went on, with a glance over his spectacles at Sir John, ‘our host, who owns two-thirds of the cottages in Polpeor, may correct me and say that Government never offered a fair rent?’ Sir John threw back his head and laughed. ‘My heir, when he succeeds me,’ he said, ‘may start new industries in Polpeor; but I’ll not build new houses to worry my sitting tenants.’