the Chief is dead. own shadow, you

be your know."

Angela picked it up and looked into it again. "It does smell a little of Africa," she said.

"It just shows," she said, as she paused at the door. Angela had a way of pronouncing this formula with a positive and knowing emphasis.

Angela blamed Jessie. Rather unfairly, I thought, but Angela was unfair sometimes when she was hurt. As a great philosopher once said, we judge human actions by the pleasure or pain they give us.

"She must have broken the handle and glued it on without saying anything about it. She ought to have told me."

"Can't you wash it?" I suggested fatuously, and received a look of pitying scorn.

It was her Chinese alder dress, a light champagne colour. It had rows of intriguing black figures cunningly distributed on the sleeves and the neck and the hem of the skirt, like bars of music or Chinese characters. They reminded me of the fruit of the alder. That was why we called it the Chinese alder. It was quite ordinary stuff, I believe, and of a rigorous simplicity. I am not a connoisseur in these things, and it was too subtly conceived to reveal any contrivance; but I gathered

What she meant, I suppose, was that her philosophy of the waylaying malice inherent even

cated once more. This time I was inclined to agree with her that it did show. The Chinese alder was the most valuable thing in the room which the discriminating Chimbashi could have chosen to begin his work upon.

I looked at the medicineman's relic with increased interest. We must lock it up, I thought. A cork won't do.

The children gloated over their treasure, turning from one object to another. The smell of camphor pervaded the room. The purple emperor was being measured against the papilio. There was talk of a division of spoils. A communal collection was so dull. Val offered Irene the whole of the museum, even the purple emperor and the shoe made by the lunatic at Colney Hatch, if she would let him keep the papilio and the blue bird-winged butterfly and the dead-leaf insect for his very own. Irene, of course, rejected this offer with proper scorn. He threw in the Goliath beetle,

but she laughed derisively, like a little box-wallah. She had a better idea of a deal. Val might keep the blue bird-winged butterfly and the dead-leaf insect if he gave her the papilio in exchange. "That's two for one," she conceded generously. The rest of the things they could divide, and draw lots for the first choice, like picking sides.

And so they bickered and chaffered. Chimbashi, of course, was indivisible.

Val picked it up again. "Let's wish for something," he said.

Irene jeered at his innocence. "Don't be so silly. It's no good wishing if it's not your own shadow."

and pans had been scraped and were put out in the sun to dry. They were attracted by bright things. The blue bird-winged butterfly, too, and the deadleaf insect were as common as cabbage-whites in Africa.

The children seemed disappointed. I disliked Uncle Bliss intensely.

But worse was to come. He derided Chimbashi. He said that it must have been a miserable specimen of an antelope. And why a single horn! "Why didn't she send you the whole head while she was about it?" And he told them that he could give them a much better head, not that he would give them one. That might have been

time I had heard him snub the children. What had he come for, I wondered?

He had come to see me, it seemed, and about a lawyer. More litigation. He had just lost another big libel suit. Enormous costs. He wanted to change his firm of solicitors. They had landed him with a bill for over three thousand pounds. And now there were more legal complications about the purchase of the Clapperhouse. "They're a lot of saurians. Do you know what I had to pay for a stamp?" Also there was trouble with the workmen. They don't know on which side their bread is buttered, but I'll show them! Uncle Bliss was minatory in the shadow of these catastrophes. He shook his fist at them.

charge."

"I suppose you will have to pay a pretty stiff price for it."

"Five figures, perhaps. But I won't let it go whatever it costs."

Here he stopped and began to puncture the gravel absentmindedly with his walkingstick.

"Five figures! Yes. I'll find it. It's an investment. But I am not going to stand any more of their nonsense at the Clapperhouse. Seventy pounds for drains! Enough to feed a rhino for six months. And now they want to repair the roof. Say the rain is coming in. Let it come in. Servants' bedrooms! Let them sleep somewhere else. There's room enough. Saxby has just sent me in his estimate. Enough to pay my taxidermist's wages for a whole year."

Uncle Bliss was moving round in a slow circle, the subconscious part of him occupied with some design he was pricking out on the gravel.

"Saxby must go," he exploded. "He's about as much use as an anthropoid ape. Anyhow, I can't afford him. That's what I came to talk to you about. Lawyers! I want an economical man. And he must

"Yes, to New York."

Uncle Bliss' new quest was the dinosaur's egg. It was on sale in the United States.

"I found a cable waiting for me when I got away from those pestilential teetotallers last night. There are other bidders."

without pouring money into the drains. Now, what about your solicitor at Homerton ?

"Borett, you mean. He couldn't possibly take it on. Much too busy."

Borett was an old friend of mine. He wouldn't thank me for introducing Bliss in a

I could

business connection. imagine that he would very soon find a polite way of sending him to the devil.

"Why don't you advertise for an estate agent?" I suggested.

"I wanted you to help me." "I am afraid I can't- "I began.

But Uncle Bliss interrupted me with an explosion of grunts. I cannot be sure of his exact words, but it sounded very like, "Then do the other thing." "How long do you expect to be away?

"In America? The inside of a month. Not more."

Uncle Bliss stepped off the gravel on to the grass, and surveyed his design, a fearsome creature like a gigantic lizard with a huge toothed beak and wings.

"What about the pterodactyl?" I asked him.

The pterodactyl, he told me, would have to wait. Until Christmas, perhaps. It would mean fitting out an expedition. And from New York he was going straight to the Pyrenees. He intended to be at Luchon before the end of October. Luchon! It was one of the Brebis' haunts.

"Not baths!" I gasped. "No, funguses. That is to say, a particular fungus. Amanita Cæsarea, if you want to know." He described it. "Orange-red cap, yellow gills, frilled ring on the stem

"I didn't know you collected funguses."

"I collect everything."

There was nothing vulgarly sensational about Uncle Bliss' subjection to the tyranny of objects. He seemed to want this fungus every bit as much as the dinosaur's egg or the pterodactyl. In fact, he was putting off the pterodactyl for it. It was the children's museum again on a large scale, the lunatic's shoe, the envelope with forty-five postmarks on it, and now the Goliath beetle and the papilio. A more robust and adult curiosity, perhaps, but with little more science or method in it.

"It will look well on the drive," he said, "if I can get it to seed."

The vision of the orange cap and yellow gills had exorcised financial and litigious vapours.

"And while I am about it there are two plants I want to get the roots of, Monotropa and Lathræa. One ought to find them in the beech-woods at Luchon."

We had started our promenade again, and Uncle Bliss stopped to transfix a toadstool with the ferrule of his stick.

"Saprophytes both," he added, I supposed with reference to these plants of the Pyrenean beech-woods.

We were standing by the summer-house now, and I heard a nervous sheep-like cough inside.

Silly Brebis! She was quite safe. Why did she give herself away? I believe she thought saprophyte was a word that ought not to be overheard