Off we go to the kitchen-garden.  There the admiration is genial, practical.  We admire the extent of the beds marked out for asparagus, and the French disposition of the planting at wide intervals; and the French system of training peach, pear, and plum trees on the walls to win length and catch sun, we much admire.  We admire the gardener.  We are induced temporarily to admire the French people.  They are sagacious in fruit-gardens.  They have not the English Constitution, you think rightly; but in fruit-gardens they grow for fruit, and not, as Victor quotes a friend, for wood, which the valiant English achieve.  We hear and we see examples of sagacity; and we are further brought round to the old confession, that we cannot cook; Colney Durance has us there; we have not studied herbs and savours; and so we are shocked backward step by step until we retreat precipitately into the nooks where waxen tapers, carefully tended by writers on the Press, light-up mysterious images of our national selves for admiration.  Something surely we do, or we should not be where we are.  But what is it we do (excepting cricket, of course) which others cannot do?  Colney asks; and he excludes cricket and football.

An acutely satiric man in an English circle, that does not resort to the fist for a reply to him, may almost satiate the excessive fury roused in his mind by an illogical people of a provocative prosperity, mainly tongueless or of leaden tongue above the pressure of their necessities, as he takes them to be.  They give him so many opportunities.  They are angry and helpless as the log hissing to the saw.  Their instinct to make use of the downright in retort, restrained as it is by a buttoned coat of civilization, is amusing, inviting.  Colney Durance allured them to the quag’s edge and plunged them in it, to writhe patriotically; and although it may be said, that they felt their situation less than did he the venom they sprang in his blood, he was cruel; he caused discomfort.  But these good friends about him stood for the country, an illogical country; and as he could not well attack his host Victor Radnor, an irrational man, he selected the abstract entity for the discharge of his honest spite.

The irrational friend was deeper at the source of his irritation than the illogical old motherland.  This house of Lakelands, the senselessness of his friend in building it and designing to live in it, after experiences of an incapacity to stand in a serene contention with the world he challenged, excited Colney’s wasp.  He was punished, half way to frenzy behind his placable demeanour, by having Dr. Schlesien for chorus.  And here again, it was the unbefitting, not the person, which stirred his wrath.  A German on English soil should remember the dues of a guest.  At the same time, Colney said things to snare the acclamation of an observant gentleman of that race, who is no longer in his first enthusiasm for English beef and the complexion of the women.  ’Ah, ya, it is true, what you say:  “The English grow as fast as odders, but they grow to corns instead of brains.”  They are Bull.  Quaat true.’  He bellowed on a laugh the last half of the quotation.