“I am the man who knows too much to know anything, or, at any rate, to do anything,” said Horne Fisher.  “I don’t mean especially about Ireland.  I mean about England.  I mean about the whole way we are governed, and perhaps the only way we can be governed.  You asked me just now what became of the survivors of that tragedy.  Well, Wilson recovered and we managed to persuade him to retire.  But we had to pension that damnable murderer more magnificently than any hero who ever fought for England.  I managed to save Michael from the worst, but we had to send that perfectly innocent man to penal servitude for a crime we know he never committed, and it was only afterward that we could connive in a sneakish way at his escape.  And Sir Walter Carey is Prime Minister of this country, which he would probably never have been if the truth had been told of such a horrible scandal in his department.  It might have done for us altogether in Ireland; it would certainly have done for him.  And he is my father’s old friend, and has always smothered me with kindness.  I am too tangled up with the whole thing, you see, and I was certainly never born to set it right.  You look distressed, not to say shocked, and I’m not at all offended at it.  Let us change the subject by all means, if you like.  What do you think of this Burgundy?  It’s rather a discovery of mine, like the restaurant itself.”

And he proceeded to talk learnedly and luxuriantly on all the wines of the world; on which subject, also, some moralists would consider that he knew too much.

III.  THE SOUL OF THE SCHOOLBOY

A large map of London would be needed to display the wild and zigzag course of one day’s journey undertaken by an uncle and his nephew; or, to speak more truly, of a nephew and his uncle.  For the nephew, a schoolboy on a holiday, was in theory the god in the car, or in the cab, tram, tube, and so on, while his uncle was at most a priest dancing before him and offering sacrifices.  To put it more soberly, the schoolboy had something of the stolid air of a young duke doing the grand tour, while his elderly relative was reduced to the position of a courier, who nevertheless had to pay for everything like a patron.  The schoolboy was officially known as Summers Minor, and in a more social manner as Stinks, the only public tribute to his career as an amateur photographer and electrician.  The uncle was the Rev. Thomas Twyford, a lean and lively old gentleman with a red, eager face and white hair.  He was in the ordinary way a country clergyman, but he was one of those who achieve the paradox of being famous in an obscure way, because they are famous in an obscure world.  In a small circle of ecclesiastical archaeologists, who were the only people who could even understand one another’s discoveries, he occupied a recognized and respectable place.  And a critic might have found even in that day’s journey at least as much of the uncle’s hobby as of the nephew’s holiday.