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scandalized.
    “Can't I though?” Simon took the pole that the sheep-herder had left behind and, with it, unhooked a couple of latches that kept the side of the sheep cage in position. It folded down to make a sloping ramp onto the platform, and the sheep tumbled and spilled down it, bleating and staggering, some of them hardly able to move, bewildered, gasping and trembling. A few of them continued to lie motionless on the floor of the cage. For them the rescue had come too late.
    “Blimey!” said the engine driver. “That's showing em, though, ain't it?”
    “But look here,” said his mate. “They sheep do be somebody's property. We had to deliver em to a Mister Mitchle Bone at Marshport. What's he a-going to say about this howdydo? Or Sir Thomas, what they come from?”
    “Tell him to get in touch with me and
I'll
pay him (if he dares to, knowing how those poor beasts have been ill-treated).” By now Simon had undone the fastenings of the second and third sheep cars and more and more of the liberated animals had tottered down to the platform and the rail track.
    “Here's my card,” said Simon, handing a pasteboard square to the driver, and he repeated, “Tell the owner to get in touch with me.”
    “But guvner—what be ye a-going to
do
with all they dentical sheep?”
    Simon had climbed into the horse box and now reappeared, leading Magpie with her saddle, saddlebags and bridle strapped on.
    “Do?” he asked, tightening a girth. “Why, I'll take them to where they can get better treatment.”
    “Not on our train?”
    “Certainly not on your train. They can do the journey on foot. But it's not far.”
    “Reckon they'll follow ye, guvner?”
    “I reckon so,” Simon said with confidence. “Animals mostly do.” He put two fingers in his mouth and let out a piercing whistle.
    Some of the sheep, who had started to nibble on what sparse vegetation there was around the station, lifted their heads and moved toward him. Thunderbolt the owl came drifting from the open carriage window. Simon jumped up on Magpie's back and Thunderbolt settled on his shoulder.
    “Come up, mare! No more train travel.”
    Magpie, not sorry to leave the stuffy horse box, shook her head and whinnied, then trotted off briskly alongside the rail track that led south. Simon whistled again, and the whole flock of sheep streamed after him in a gray-white mass.
    “Well, by gar!” said the train driver. “Us mit as well go home for the day; there's no other passengers on this part of the train.”
    “What about me?” grumbled a peevish voice. It was the horse-box attendant, standing on his steps.
    “You can wait for the two-thirty-five back to King's Cross.”
    The driver was studying Simon's card. “By gar!” he said again. “Who'd a thought it? Proper well set up young un he were, but no more than a lad, I'd ha' said. But looky here….”
    “Why? Who is he then?” asked his mate, staring at the card. “I'm no scholard.”
    On the card in black capital letters were the words:
SIMON 6 th DUKE OF BATTERSEA
    “He's a blooming dook, that's who he be,” said the driver.
    The chaise, which had been stationary all this time behind a clump of willows, now proceeded on its way.

London was not a pleasant place in the best of weather, and on a damp, dark, foggy winter evening it was at its worst. The massive masonry was blackened by tendrils of wet moss, peacocks let out doleful cries from the aviary, the lions roared despairingly from the menagerie, and they were answered by the long-drawn angry howls of hungry wolves on the Kent side of the river Thames.
    Dr. Blisland, though he had entered the gloomy fortress on every day of his life, in his official capacity as fortress physician to any prisoners who might require medical attention, felt an unaccustomed shiver in his spine that evening as he climbed the slope to the Traitors' Gate and walked toward the Wakefield Tower, where his patient was confined, passing a sign that said