They have healthy frames, you see; and as the healthy frame is not artificially heated, it ensues that, under any title you like, they profess the principles--into the bog we go, we have got round to it!--the principles of those horrible marching and chanting people! Then, must our England, to be redoubtable to the enemy, be a detestable country for habitation?
Here was a knot.
Skepsey's head dropped lower, he went as a ram.

The sayings of Mr.
Durance about his dear England: that 'her remainder of life is in the activity of her diseases'-- that 'she has so fed upon Pap of Compromise as to be unable any longer to conceive a muscular resolution': that 'she is animated only as the carcase to the blow-fly'; and so forth:--charged on him during his wrestle with his problem.

And the gentlemen had said, had permitted himself to say, that our England's recent history was a provincial apothecary's exhibition of the battle of bane and antidote.
Mr.Durance could hardly mean it.

But how could one answer him when he spoke of the torpor of the people, and of the succeeding Governments as a change of lacqueys--or the purse-string's lacqueys?
He said, that Old England has taken to the arm-chair for good, and thinks it her whole business to pronounce opinions and listen to herself; and that, in the face of an armed Europe, this great nation is living on sufferance.

Oh! Skepsey had uttered the repudiating exclamation.
'Feel quite up to it ?' he was asked by his neighbour.
The mover of armed hosts for the defence of the country sat in a third-class carriage of the train, approaching the first of the stations on the way to town.