“Thought you were down at Malwood,” I said, “looking after your flocks and herds, your brocoli and your spring onions.”

[Illustration: 

  Ask why was made the gem so small
    And why so huge the granite? 
  Because ’twas meant that men should set
    The larger value on it.
]

“So I had hoped to be,” he said, as we strolled up and down under the trees in the Elisengarten.  “But the fact is, TOBY, dear boy, I could not stand the weather.  I am of a sensitive nature, and it cut me to the heart to see cold winds nipping the fruit and trees, the flood of rain beating down the corn, the oats, and the mangel-wurzel.  People make a mistake about me.  They regard me as an ambitious politician, caring for nothing but the House of Commons and the world of politics.  At heart I am an agriculturist.  Give me three acres and a cow—­anybody’s, I don’t care—­and I will settle down in peace and quietness, remote from political strife, never turning an ear to listen to the roll of battle at Westminster.  I am often distraught between the attractions of interludes in the lives of CINCINNATUS and of WILLIAM OF ORANGE’s great Minister.  Of the two I think I am more drawn towards the rose-garden at Sheen than by CINCINNATUS’s unploughed land.  Before I die I should like to create a new rose and call it ‘The Grand Old Man.’”

Quite a revelation this of the true inwardness of the SQUIRE.  Would astonish some people in London, I fancy, if ever I were to mention this conversation.  But, to quote once more from a revered authority:  “We all live a dual life, and are not actually that which, upon cursory regard, the passer-by believes us to be.  Every gentleman, in whatever part of the House he may sit, has a skeleton in the cupboard of his valet.”

The SQUIRE stayed here only a morning, passing on to other scenes.  I watched his departure with mingled feelings; sorrow at losing a delightful companion, and apprehension of what might happen if he were to remain here to go through the full cure.  The place is, as SARK says, the most brimstony on the same level.  You breathe brimstone, drink it, bathe in it, and take it in at the pores.  At the end of three weeks or a month you are dangerously saturated with the chemical.  An ordinary lucifer match is nothing to a full-bodied patient at the end of three weeks treatment at Aix-la-Chapelle.  If the SQUIRE had stayed on, I should never have seen his towering frame pass underneath a doorway without my heart leaping to my mouth.  Some day he would have accidentally struck his head against the lintel and would have ignited as sure as a gun.

If CHARLEMAGNE were now alive, I feel certain from what I know of him, he would have exhausted the resources of civilisation in search of a preventive of this ever-present and dangerous risk.  Under CAROLO MAGNO the patient might have gone about the streets of Aix-la-Chapelle with sweet carelessness, knowing that, however much brimstone he carried, he would strike only on the box.