“Hello, March!” Mr. Fox said affably, “you’re drunk.”

His Lordship smiled, bowed graciously if unsteadily to me, and did not appear to resent the pleasantry.  Then he sighed.

“What a pair of cubs it is,” said he; “I wish to God I was young again.  I hear you astonished the world again last night, Charles.”

We left him being assisted into his residence by a sleepy footman, paid our toll at Hyde Park Corner, and rolled onward toward Kensington, Fox laughing as we passed the empty park at the thought of what had so lately occurred there.  After the close night of St. Stephen’s, nature seemed doubly beautiful.  The sun slanted over the water in the gardens in bars of green and gold.  The bright new leaves were on the trees, and the morning dew had brought with it the smell of the living earth.  We passed the stream of market wagons lumbering along, pulled by sturdy, patient farm-horses, driven by smocked countrymen, who touched their caps to the fine gentlemen of the court end of town; who shook their heads and exchanged deep tones over the whims of quality, unaccountable as the weather.  But one big-chested fellow arrested his salute, a scowl came over his face, and he shouted back to the wagoner whose horses were munching his hay: 

“Hi, Jeems, keep down yere hands.  Mr. Fox is noo friend of we.”

This brought a hard smile on Mr. Fox’s face.

“I believe, Richard,” he said, “I have become more detested than any man in Parliament.”

“And justly,” I replied; “for you have fought all that is good in you.”

“I was mobbed once, in Parliament Street.  I thought they would kill me.  Have you ever been mobbed, Richard?” he asked indifferently.

“Never, I thank Heaven,” I answered fervently.

“I think I would rather be mobbed than indulge in any amusement I know of,” he continued.  “Than confound Wedderburn, or drive a measure against Burke,—­which is no bad sport, my word on’t.  I would rather be mobbed than have my horse win at Newmarket.  There is a keen pleasure you wot not of, my lad, in listening to Billingsgate and Spitalfields howl maledictions upon you.  And no sensation I know of is equal to that of the moment when the mud and sticks and oranges are coming through the windows of your coach, when the dirty weavers are clutching at your ruffles and shaking their filthy fists under your nose.”

“It is, at any rate, strictly an aristocratic pleasure,” I assented, laughing.

So we came to Holland House.  Its wide fields of sprouting corn, its woods and pastures and orchards in blossom, were smiling that morning, as though Leviathan, the town, were not rolling onward to swallow them.  Lord Holland had bought the place from the Warwicks, with all its associations and memories.  The capped towers and quaint facades and projecting windows were plain to be seen from where we halted in the shaded park, and to the south was that Kensington Road we