Well, he got fonder and fonder of this wood, and kept on asking people what he should do, and how one could make most use of it, and he worried a good deal about it.  He reads books about woods, and in the opening of 1891 he had down to stay with him for a few days a man called Churt, who had made a great success with woods on the Warra-Warra.  But Churt was a vulgar fellow, and so Hermann-Postlethwaite’s wife, Lady Gywnnys Hermann-Postlethwaite, would not have him in the house again, which was a bother.  Her husband then rode over to see another man, and the upshot of it was that he put up a great board saying “Trespassers in this wood will be prosecuted,” and it might as well not have been put up, for no one ever went into the wood, not even from the little town, because it was too far for them to walk, and, anyhow, they did not care for walking.  And as for the doctor’s son, a boy of thirteen, who went in there with an air-gun to shoot things, he paid no attention to the board.

The next thing my friend did was to have a fine strong paling put all round the wood in March, 1894.  This paling was of oak; it was seven feet high; it had iron spikes along the top.  There were six gates in it, and stout posts at intervals of ten yards.  The boards overlapped very exactly.  It was as good a bit of work as ever I saw.  He had it varnished, and it looked splendid.  All this took two years.

Just then he was elected to Parliament, not for Berkshire, as you might have imagined, but for a slum division of Birmingham.  He was very proud of this, and quite rightly too.  He said:  “I am the one Conservative member in the Midlands.”  It almost made him forget about his wood.  He shut up the Berkshire place and took a house in town, and as he could not afford Mayfair, and did not understand such things very well, the house he took was an enormous empty house in Bayswater, and he had no peace until he gave it up for a set of rooms off Piccadilly; and then his mother thought that looked so odd that he did the right thing, and got into a nice old-fashioned furnished house in Westminster, overlooking the Green Park.

But all this cost him a mint of money, and politics made him angrier and angrier.  They never let him speak, and they made him vote for things he thought perfectly detestable.  Then he did speak, and as he was an honest English gentleman the papers called him ridiculous names and said he had no brains.  So he just jolly well threw the whole thing up and went back to Berkshire, and everybody welcomed him, and he did a thing he had never done before:  he put a flag up over his house to show he was at home.  Then he began to think of his wood again.