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young days. Are you aware that in the year 1894 Parsloe filled Galahad's dog Towser up with steak and onions just before the big Rat contest, so that his own terrier Banjo should win? A fellow who stuck at nothing to attain his ends. And he's just the same today. Hasn't changed a bit. Look at the way he stole that man Wellbeloved away from me - the chap who used to be m y pig-man before Pirbright. Fell ow capable of that is capable of anything.'
    Lady Constance spurned the grass with a frenzied foot. She would have preferred to kick her brother with it, but one has one's breeding.
    'You are a perfect imbecile about Sir Gregory,' she cried. 'You
    ought to be ashamed of yourself. So ought Galahad, if it were possible for him to be ashamed of anything. You are behaving like a couple of half-witted children. I hate this idiotic quarrel. If there's one thing that's detestable in the country, it is being on bad terms with one's neighbours.'
    ' I don't care how bad terms I'm on with Parsloe.'
    ' Well, I do. And that is why I was so glad to oblige him when he rang up about his nephew.'
    'Eh?'
    'I was delighted to have the chance of proving to him that there was at least one sane person in Blandings Castle.' 'Nephew? What nephew?'
    'Young Montague Bodkin. You ought to remember him. He was here often enough when he was a boy.' 'Bodkin? Bodkin? Bodkin?'
    'Oh, for pity's sake, Clarence, don't keep saying "Bodkin" as if you were a parrot. If you have forgotten him, as you forget everything that happened more than ten minutes ago, it does not matter in the least. The point is that Sir Gregory asked me as a personal favour to engage him as your secretary...'
    Lord Emsworth was a mild man, but he could be stirred.
    'Well, I'm dashed! Well, I'm hanged! The man steals my pig-man and engineers the theft of my pig, and he has the nerve.'
    '. . . and I said I should be delighted.'
    'What!'
    'I said I should be delighted.' 'You don't mean you've done it?' 'Certainly. It's all arranged.'
    'You mean you're letting a nephew of Parsloe's loose in Blandings Castle, with two weeks to go before the Agricultural Show?'
    'He arrives tomorrow by the two-forty-five,' said Lady Constance.
    And as she had thrown her bomb and seen it explode and had now reached the front door and had no wish to waste her time listening to futile protests, she swept into the house and left Lord Emsworth standing.
    He remained standing for perhaps a minute. Then the imperative necessity of sharing this awful news wi th a cooler, wiser mind than his own stirred him to life and activity. His face drawn, his long legs trembling beneath him, he hurried towards the lawn where his brother Galahad, whisky and soda in hand, reclined in his deckchair.
    Chapter Four
    Cooled by the shade of the cedar, refreshed by the contents of the amber glass in which ice tinkled so musically when he lifted it to his lips, the Hon. Galahad, at the moment of Lord Emsworth's arrival, had achieved a Nirvana-like repose. Storms might be raging elsewhere in the grounds of Blandings Castle, but there on the lawn there was peace - the perfect unruffled peace which in this world seems to come only to those who have done nothing whatever to deserve it.
    The Hon. Galahad Threepwood, in his fifty-seventh year, was a dapper little gentleman on whose grey but still thickly-covered head the weight of a consistently misspent life rested lightly. His flannel suit sat jauntily upon his wiry frame, a black-rimmed monocle gleamed jauntily in his eye. Everything about this Musketeer of the nineties was jaunty. It was a standing mystery to all who knew him that one who had had such an extraordinarily good time all his life should, in the evening of that life, be so superbly robust. Wan contemporaries who had once painted a gas-lit London red in his company and were now doomed to an existence of dry toast, Vichy water, and German cure resorts felt very strongly on this point. A man of his antecedents, they considered, ought by