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“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.

“Cr-r-ri-key!” said Hinchcliffe, as the car on a wild cant to the left went astern, screwing herself round the angle of a track that overhung the pond. “If she only had two propellers, I believe she’d talk poetry. She can do everything else.”

“We’re rather on our port wheels now,” said Kysh; “but I don’t think she’ll capsize. This road isn’t used much by motors.”

“You don’t say so,” said Pyecroft. “What a pity!”

She bored through a mass of crackling brushwood, and emerged into an upward sloping fern-glade fenced with woods so virgin, so untouched, that William Rufus might have ridden off as we entered. We climbed out of the violet-purple shadows towards the upland where the last of the day lingered. I was filled to my moist eyes with the almost sacred beauty of sense and association that clad the landscape.

“Does ‘unger produce ‘alluciations?” said Pyecroft in a whisper. “Because I’ve just seen a sacred ibis walkin’ arm in arm with a British cock- pheasant.”

“What are you panickin’ at?” said Hinchcliffe. “I’ve been seein’ zebra for the last two minutes, but I ‘aven’t complained.”

He pointed behind us, and I beheld a superb painted zebra (Burchell’s, I think), following our track with palpitating nostrils. The car stopped, and it fled away.

There was a little pond in front of us from which rose a dome of irregular sticks crowned with a blunt-muzzled beast that sat upon its haunches.

“Is it catching?” said Pyecroft.

“Yes. I’m seeing beaver,” I replied.

“It is here!” said Kysh, with the air and gesture of Captain Nemo, and half turned.

“No–no–no! For ‘Eaven’s sake–not ‘ere!” Our guest gasped like a sea- bathed child, as four efficient hands swung him far out-board on to the turf. The car ran back noiselessly down the slope.

“Look! Look! It’s sorcery!” cried Hinchcliffe.

There was a report like a pistol shot as the beaver dived from the roof of his lodge, but we watched our guest. He was on his knees, praying to kangaroos. Yea, in his bowler hat he kneeled before kangaroos–gigantic, erect, silhouetted against the light–four buck-kangaroos in the heart of Sussex!

And we retrogressed over the velvet grass till our hind-wheels struck well-rolled gravel, leading us to sanity, main roads, and, half an hour later, the “Grapnel Inn” at Horsham.

* * * * *

After a great meal we poured libations and made burnt-offerings in honour of Kysh, who received our homage graciously, and, by the way, explained a few things in the natural history line that had puzzled us. England is a most marvellous country, but one is not, till one knows the eccentricities of large land-owners, trained to accept kangaroos, zebras, or beavers as part of its landscape.

When we went to bed Pyecroft pressed my hand, his voice thick with emotion.

“We owe it to you,” he said. “We owe it all to you. Didn’t I say we never met in pup-pup-puris naturalibus, if I may so put it, without a remarkably hectic day ahead of us?”

“That’s all right,” I said. “Mind the candle.” He was tracing smoke- patterns on the wall.

“But what I want to know is whether we’ll succeed in acclimatisin’ the blighter, or whether Sir William Gardner’s keepers ‘ll kill ‘im before ‘e gets accustomed to ‘is surroundin’s?”

Some day, I think, we must go up the Linghurst Road and find out.