or the crocodile; the foundation stone of the palace of the King Penguin was still unlaid. It seemed to me rather an inhospitable sheet of water, homely but exclusive, not prepared for exotic guests. The cindery grey of the willows, the aspens trembling, the sedges leaning forward in a row, the startled grebes and waterhens were familiar to Renton Parva; somehow I could not fit them into the picture of Uncle Bliss' zoological gardens, with flamingoes and adjutants. An alligator's nose under a hawthorn, especially in May time, would be horrid. But for a long time I had shared Angela's belief that there wasn't going to be no zoo.

Val produced the terminal post, the broken end of a water-level marker with black lines on white paint, which they had picked up after a flood. They drove it into the soft squashy turf, where the beck oozed out of its bed of brooklime and water-cress, more a spring on the edge of the lake than an overflow, the sort of place where you are disappointed if you do not flush a snipe. Val was afraid that somebody would pull it up, but Irene said that she would tell Uncle Bliss about it. She seemed quite satisfied that a word from her would be enough to preserve their boundaries.

The word had come to denote a philosophical school of thought in the family.

"But he means to," Irene amended.

Generally speaking, she was the less sanguine of the two, rather inclined to be a little unbeliever, but her newlyacquired ascendancy over the providence of the Clapperhouse had reversed the rôles. I wondered how long it would last.

But here was the providence himself. Val was the first to spy him lounging towards us from the direction of the stables. Uncle Bliss was wearing the same grey suit in which he had lunched with us little more than three months ago, the trousers very baggy at the knees and very tight underneath, looking as if the calves would burst them, and the pockets mysteriously bulging

but bulges now had merely an objective interest. I had never seen him in any other suit, except the portentous swallow-tails he wore at the Potters'.

The Queen of Sheba was immediately enthroned on his shoulders, which, it seemed, had become her privileged mode of progression. A brawny hand was extended to Val. "I was looking out for you," he said to me. "Expected you hours ago. And how's my little rosebud ?

"Very well, thank you, Uncle Bliss; and how are you?'

Bliss ?

"Ah, there you have the advantage of me."

To the children, of course, the interior was a terrestrial

"We shall see. If not, we will send for one. Is it the Queen of Sheba's command!" Uncle Bliss seemed to have set permanently into a good shape, like a blancmange. One does not buy a dinosaur's egg every day.

"Now, where is Don Quixote?" I asked myself as I surveyed our muscular and confident friend, four square, fortified at all points, and so little of a visionary. A barrel of cement could not be more impervious to rubs. Where did the pathos come in?

He escorted us across the wasted park, past the saw-pits with their rotting cross poles, the hollows where the Scots firs had been felled, the tumbledown lichened barns of the Out farm, and the straggling unkempt hedges which marked land that had been enclosed in Slingsby's father's time. It was once all park. The wilted regiments of ragwort and thistles depressed me. I had no ambition to be Bliss' estate agent.

Even from a distance the Clapperhouse was in a visible state of disrepair. Its square spacious ugliness reminded me of a Turkish cavalry barracks. However, there was plenty of room to put things in, and that was what Uncle Bliss bought it for a sort of dump. The place

My

Kubla Khan; but I am afraid it is necessary in the interests of the prosy and literal Muse I serve to correct Irene's appreciation with an adult view of Uncle Bliss' museum. first impression was of lumber run riot, the kind of nightmare Mrs Staff might have if after a repast of pineapple and spatchcock the stuffed vermin-holding capacity of her cottage were to swell and increase to the proportions of the Albert Hall. Many of Uncle Bliss' exhibits were stowed away in packing-cases, but enough had been exhumed to prepare me for the chaos of unrelated objects that has since become notorious. I think we were the first visitors to see the Clapperhouse Collection in embryo.

Irene constituted herself assistant showman. "The hippopotamus is at the door," she whispered to Val as we entered. And there it was standing, or rather squatting, to receive us. One could see that Staff had had no hand in the hippopotamus. Uncle Bliss had gone to one of the best taxidermists in South Africa, who had mounted the beast in the attitude in which it had fallen back bellowing, with its head up, into the water. The vis-à-vis of the pachyderm was a magnificent polar bear (purchased) with a cub. Uncle Bliss introduced them. "Ursa Major and Ursa

a

Minor. What are you giggling at, young man?" Next came a lion which looked as if it had died of mange, shot by Uncle Bliss, cured by Staff. A South American jaguar rubbed shoulders with a Tibetan kiang. Strange stable companions. A snow leopard (Ward) consorted with a Devonshire badger (Staff) and giraffe (Staff), as if the animals in the ark had changed partners in some country dance. It was the kind of museum Alice might have seen through the looking-glass, beasts from all lands, some innocent and familiar, others strange and fierce, looking as if they had come out of the Apocalypse, wyverns and basilisks perhaps. "The owl and the panther were sharing a pie." I was quite prepared to meet the griffon and the mock turtle on the stairs.

But the best view of this still life menagerie was from the centre of the hall. When I took my stand here and looked round at the four walls I was reminded of a great khan in the Yemen, camels stalled beside little donkeys, only the animals all had their rumps to the wall, and were staring out at me. One had to move circumspectly. The caravan serai was crowded with tables on which loose objects were strewn promiscuously, and cabinets with glass tops, among which it was difficult to pick your way, an equally heterogeneous collection, while under the stairs alligators and cuttle

fish and sharks and other sea monsters and stuffed cretacea were hanging from hooks and chains in the ceiling like objects in a Dutch interior.

On the stairs Staff's exhibits were given a prominent place. They all looked very sorry for themselves about the muzzle; hairs had dropped out; hardly one had good ears. There was a giant eland standing on its four legs as stiff as a towel horse, and a cracked rhino hide thrown over an erection that looked like parallel bars. Staff could make a flat skin, but he had never planed one in his life; Uncle Bliss' coolies must have carried double weight. Clarkson was right. Inflated gollywogs and bags of sawdust. And he had no idea of mounting. None of his bones were properly articulated.

Uncle Bliss took us to a wing of the house which had once been the servants' quarters, a warren of bedrooms fitted with cupboards with glass doors, and chests of drawers which emitted a smell of camphor and decay. In the passages there were broad open shelves littered with fossils, skeletons, flint implements, sea-shells, and a variety of dull colourless objects in bottles, out of which the spirits had evaporated. The whiskers of a civet cat brushed a plaster cast of the Neanderthal man. It was not what you might call a systematic or educative collection. The student of comparative anatomy would have found it

lacking in plan. There was no grouping of objects which together told a tale. Darwin and Mendel might never have existed. And if you occasion ally ran up against a skeleton of one of the higher anthropoids, a gorilla or a lemur, at a corner of the stairs or in some alcove where a knight in armour ought to have stood, you might be quite sure that Uncle Bliss had not stuck it there with any highbrow scientific intention. The student might look in vain for a key to the essential features of the order Primates in the Clapperhouse Collection. I remember Clarkson telling me how Uncle Bliss had withered him when he suggested a card catalogue. "Card catalogue! Card fiddlesticks!" he replied. It certainly was rather a stupid question to ask him.

As a corrective to this confusion there were collections which he had bought in the gross, so to speak, arranged and complete, which could not help being instructive. This explained his loans all over the country. One cabinet showed the life history of various insects. He had bought it from a collector in Amsterdam. But the thing which ravished the children was the case of assimilative insects displaying their protective resemblance to a background of leaf and bark. Uncle Bliss was not a bit fussy. They were allowed to touch as well as see. They felt the praying mantis, and then the leaf or twig it straddled. Irene discovered a replica

of Marjorie's dead-leaf insect. In the case of Congo specimens a blue-roller bird was snapping up a green mantis, in spite of its wonderful make-up in imitation of its surroundings.

The butterflies were magnificent. Some of the species from Brazil outshone Marjorie's papilio. I believe the Clapperhouse Collection is still famous for its lepidoptera. Among other treasures we were shown the only complete set of extinct British coppers. What it was worth I cannot say; perhaps five figures, if one can put a price to things unpurchasable. But to do Uncle Bliss justice, he valued things more for their rarity than for what they would fetch in the market, though this, of course, threw a glamour over them when he first bought them. Acquisitiveness was his strong point, a certain dogged combativeness in the face of competition. Clarkson had been contemptuous about "Bliss' uninstructed appetite and long purse." He was tenacious too, though the glamour of acquisition seemed to wear off. When he was rummaging for Irene's spider in what had been the housekeeper's linen locker, he fished out a cardboard box containing two Great Auk's eggs.

66

"Hullo," he said. What have we got here? I had forgotten these. I must put up a stand for them in the hall."

Now there are only sixtyseven Great Auk's eggs in all the museums and private collections in the world-any

dealer can locate them for you. Uncle Bliss must have spent more on them than on the dinosaur's egg. But the paint had worn off the toy.

What did he value most? Irene asked him, and he led us to an alcove by a bow window, his holy of holies, where hung the okapi skin.

"I shot that before it was known to science," he said proudly. He took it down and ran his fingers over the miteinfested pelt.

"By the way," he said to me, "do you know Clarkson? I showed it him. One of our arm-chair zoologists, British Museum. Doesn't know the difference between an okapi and a giraffe. Why they put him there, I can't think. Specimen, I suppose. Stercoraceous fellow! Troglodyte ! "

Our attention was diverted by a heavy regular footstep in the corridor. I could tell by the expression on Irene's face who was coming round the corner. It was the adored Sancho Panza. Uncle Bliss turned to him, still stroking the skin.

"It would take a rare ignorant kind of man to understand him," Sancho Panza observed tolerantly, and added, "There's nothing so curious as folk."

This last remark, a favourite aphorism of Sancho Panza's, was addressed to me. It was our first introduction. Uncle Bliss omitted the formality. And there was no need; he introduced himself. The squire was as natural and unselfconscious in his relations with the world as the knight. There was something uncanny and intriguing about Staff, a curious incongruity in the way he walked and looked at you and talked. Everything that seemed most characteristic in his self-expression was out of keeping, irreconcilable almost, with his appearance. In feature I should have put him down as a Mediterranean type. A Catalan, perhaps. Clarkson's word was Dago. "Furrin-looking " was the Homersfield term. But his amazing squint made specification difficult.

He had a high forehead and very long black hair which stood straight up and curled over like pothooks where the parting ought to be, a frame to his squint. In spite of his sallow southern look his speech was laconically English; yet his operative eye, when it did flash on you, was like an electric torch. His walk, an absorbed stride, as if he were counting his steps, was certainly not Latin. Nor was it English, but that may have come of fluteplaying.