lation that the relics of this fabulous monster should find a resting-place on British soil." A pleasing omission was that there was no photograph of Uncle Bliss. Reporters and press photographers had tried to waylay him before, but he had a short way with them. It was in an earlier phase of notoriety that he met a deputation of pressmen on the doorstep of a house at which he was staying. The door was suddenly flung open, and he burst upon them with a gun in his hand, purple with rage, and threatened to send them off with a charge of No. 8 in their calves if they gave him any more trouble. Nothing of this got into the papers.

Knowing Uncle Bliss, I was rather tickled at the idea of taking him seriously. His only claim to respect seemed to be that he was a man of resolution. But naturally Renton Magna was interested, possibly a little contemptuous and "J."

"The press does exaggerate things so," Mrs Sellinger said.

"What is he paying for it?"

"Do you

Sellinger asked me. happen to know?" "Five figures, I believe." "Pity we couldn't touch him for the organ."

This set Renton Magna calculating.

"Twenty organs for one dinosaur egg. Expensive kind of fowl! Pity we can't run a dinosaur farm ourselves. Why didn't you bring him with you?'

"My dear," said Mrs Sellinger, "do try and be a little more sympathetic. He is bringing it home to England, you know."

I took off my hat to the editor of the Megaphone.' Is there any village in which the blare of his instrument is not heard?

Roger Clarkson of the British Museum happened to be at the bazaar, the archdeacon's nephew, and a mine of information about dinosaurs and pterodactyls, and other unfamiliar fowl or reptiles? He, of course, knew Bliss, and smiled at our notion of his scientific attainments. Bliss a naturalist! Bliss with his extravagant and puerile theories, the laughingstock of learned societies.

"We all hide when he comes to the Museum. He rolled in one day, literally rolled, with the skin of a young giraffe in his pocket, which contained among other things his lunch and a folding butterfly-net; and he tried to persuade us that it was an okapi. But you can't argue with him; it only makes him rude. He still

thinks he has shot an okapi. Ask him to show you the skin. Have you seen his stuffed specimens ?

Sellinger had not. He supposed the collection would soon be on view at the Clapperhouse. "If so, don't miss it," said Clarkson. "Inflated gollywogs. Bags of sawdust."

"No, he has got a taxidermist of sorts. A queer fellow. I don't know where he picked him up."

"Staff?" I suggested. "Yes, that's his name. Wears corduroys, and has got the most unholy squint. 'Bliss' Sancho Panza' we call him. He goes with him everywhere -Bloomsbury or Timbuctoo. Bliss took him to the Museum one day, to broaden his mind, I suppose; but the stolid Staff was not impressed. They stumped through all the rooms in the Natural History section. This took them about an hour. Then Bliss brought him into my office, and I asked him what he thought of it. All he said was, I didn't see anything there to frighten me.''

Staff's exhibits, on the contrary, were positively startling. His British specimens might pass in the parlour of an inn. But Bliss' African trophies! Clarkson described them. A taxidermist in these days must be something of a specialist, he reminded us. A little knowledge of comparative anatomy is essential; otherwise you

most elementary idea of anatomy," Clarkson concluded. "Neither has Bliss for that matter."

My loyalty was stirred at this. I don't know why, but I felt that I must champion Uncle Bliss. I was beginning to feel as sorry for him as I had been for the Brebis a few hours earlier. Why? Ursa Major was a hectoring bully. He stood as firm on his feet as a Colossus. Four-square. Where did the pathos come in?

And he had the doughty Staff for his Sancho Panza. We had heard a great deal about Staff, a devoted squire, if an indifferent taxidermist. He had once saved Bliss' life. Bliss kept him on because he liked him. Also because he was cheap. Two very good reasons. I mentioned the first to Clarkson, who did not seem to understand the alliance.

"Bliss' Sancho Panza" was very apt. I had not thought of him in that light, nor of Bliss as a pathetic or romantic figure. Clarkson must have started the current of sympathy when he derided Staff, and it flowed from the squire to the knight.

I told Clarkson that old Dickenson used to think a lot of Bliss.

"Yes," he said, "according to Dickenson, Bliss was a promising lad at Cambridge. Keen. What's wrong with him is that he has never grown up. An enfant gaté. Too much money, I suppose. Swollen head. Not that that's a bad thing. Very useful in business. Less room for other heads. But in science it won't do. There you have the anthropometric standard."

"He is not self-conscious," I objected. "I don't believe he thinks of himself in relation to other people."

Clarkson admitted that there was no vanity in Bliss. He described him rather happily as "an uninstructed appetite.' Acquisitiveness was his strong point.

Sellinger defended Ursa Major. "I like him," he said. "I hope he gets his dinosaur's egg, and that Sancho Panza doesn't sit on it."

Here Lady Potter rustled past and bowed to our group stiffly.

She has discovered that alcohol is on sale in the refreshment tent," Sellinger suggested. "Or she hasn't got over last night."

Clarkson smiled. The archdeacon had told him about the dinner. "I haven't met Bliss lately," he said, "but I hear his manners have not improved."

We watched our hostess of last night buttonhole the archdeacon, and saw him turn and

gaze with affected concern at the refreshment tent.

"Personally," said Sellinger, "I prefer a pothouse to a Potterhouse. A dose or two of Bliss would do Lady Potter a lot of good. Don't you agree with me? Last night was the first time I enjoyed a dinner in that house."

Instinctively we gravitated towards the refreshment tent. Sellinger was still commending Bliss when a maid brought him a telegram. It was from Marjorie.

"Miss Ismay has had an accident," he told us. "Broken her arm. Infernal bad luck! A motor smash, I suppose. We expected her to lunch, and she was going to stay the night."

"Miss Ismay is the only woman traveller I like," Clarkson observed.

Sellinger agreed. He detested the Amazonian tribe generically. "Dianas in puttees." "Mrs Winterbotham," they say, "hammers her coolies."

"And her husband," Clarkson emended.

He quoted other flagrant examples. Lady Vertigo, who would stand on her head to collect a crowd. Miss Carmine, who collected the photographers at Port Said by wireless. Madame Waddilove, or qu'est ce que vous aimez, as they called her in Constantinople, the Turcophile. She's got a street named after her in Stamboul." I wished Angela could have heard us; a pet theory of hers is the existence of the "mangossip."

66

Sellinger didn't believe they really enjoyed it. "Like to get themselves talked about. Picture in the 'Tatler,' and all that. Now Miss Ismay-"

"Has a sense of humour," I put in.

"I like her laugh," said Clarkson.

"Yes, Marjorie is a sportswoman," our host concluded, "and remarkably good-looking too. Extraordinary thing the sun hasn't spoilt her complexion. Critchley's a lucky fellow."

Here I saw a chance of a home for Chimbashi. I described Miss Ismay's latest contribution to the museum.

"She is a great ally of the children," Sellinger said. "She was unpacking her African cases all yesterday, worse luck, or she might have been here."

"We are," Sellinger retorted, putting down his glass. "How are things going?

"Not fast enough."
We rose guiltily.

"We must make things hum more," said our host. "Let's go and have a dip in Irene's bran-pie."

We made short work of Irene's department. It was closed in five minutes, and her money-box full. It took us nearly an hour to spend half a crown each on the coco-nuts. When we had released the children we made the tour of the stalls. Their pockets were soon Blissfully bulging. I remember a round table with edges like

Sellinger protested. You don't mean to say that you are going to give Marjorie's present away?..

beam with a feather at the end which brushed through a succession of numbered openings in the rim, wobbled, hesitated, and came to a stop in one.

"And Irene? She will have something to say to it. Can you see her endowing the nation? Don't tell me that she is such a precociously publicspirited young lady as all that.

citing, as the Brebis would say. For if it happened to be your number, you were given the choice of all the objects in the stall. Irene carried off a box with shells on the lid and a comb to give to Jessie. And

Val chose a tooth glass. He wanted one of his own to keep his water-beetles in. Then nobody would mind if he broke it. Jessie had emptied his last beetle with a company of newts into the sink. The difficulty among this superfluity of china dogs and india-rubber babies with glistening behinds was to find something really suitable for Miss Seamore. The children's number kept coming up, but nothing would quite do, and in the end we had to solve the problem by a tip, which they converted into a lace collar at Angela's stall.

Angela, who had accepted a lift in a friend's motor, left before us, and after a final visit to the marquee with Sellinger, I collected the children and disengaged the Brebis from a beatific tête-à-tête with the archdeacon, that sworn enemy of ritualism. There were others of her "persuasion persuasion" at the bazaar, for it was an evangelical neighbourhood, and I noticed a safe-in-the-fold look in her eye when she was talking to them. Her head had been very close to the archdeacon's. "I have had the most delightful afternoon," she said, as I helped her up into her high seat. Luckily the children walked home.

It was a lovely still September evening, clear overhead; only a single bank of clouds in the west absorbed all the fire of the sun. It was almost too bright and fiery. Angela, who liked quiet colours, would

have called it loud. The Brebis and I did not spoil it by chatter; we just drank it in. It was the hour of reflection. Heavenly tranquillity of a September evening, when the corn shocks standing in the fields grow spectral and ghostly, and the tawny owls call to one another, an almost human cry, and one begins to smell the dew.

The only small cloud on the horizon was Miss Seamore. Buying her presents had reminded me of what the children called ends. I hated her coming just as much as they did. No more intimate dinners with Angela when Aunt Hudson had gone! When Miss Seamore was anywhere near she was ubiquitous.

And she talked incessantly and didactically. Still we had nearly five days left. We must send the children to school a term earlier. That would be a way out. Now if Chimbashi would turn his attention to Miss Seamore

Chimbashi had been indulgent all the afternoon, but I had a suspicion that he was lying low, "a sort of feeling,” as Angela says, something premonitory in the air. When I got home I was going to put him away.

Supposing he began again on Miss Seamore. A touch of lumbago, say. Nothing serious, of course. I should hate it if Chimbashi hurt her, but some small impediment to her locomotion. I thought of Marjorie. Marjorie and the witch-doctor's shadow. What a pity she wasn't at the bazaar! If it