It was growing dusk. A nightjar began churring in an oak coppice. The cows loomed in the mist like huge black barges silhouetted in cotton wool. Lights began to appear in farm windows. At the next rise I should have to stop and light up. Poor Marjorie! I hoped her arm would mend. It was absurd to think of Chimbashi waylaying Miss Seamore; he was not an ally. Joan! Impossible! Shadow of Chimbashi! What had happened? I was lying on the road on the top of the Brebis, who was clasping Joan's neck.

soon

An hour later Angela in one of her reconnaissances from the hall doorstep saw by the light of the moon a melancholy procession coming up the drive. The Brebis was alone in the dogcart, lying like a dislocated sack across the seat, clinging on to the rail with both hands. Her bonnet had slipped round to the back of her head, and under the string two little wisps of fluffy grey hair stuck out like sheep's ears. The muscles of her poor neck seemed to be functionless. And I was between the shafts wheeling her in. Or, there was only one shaft; the other was on the road somewhere. I had left the broken-kneed Joan tied up to a gate.

We dined alone. We had

I had the history of a full day to relate. Uncle Bliss made history rapidly; he spun it out like yarn. I began at the beginning with his brusquerie with the children and his deri sion of Chimbashi. Angela agreed that he was "J" of Marjorie. That would explain Irene's shilling. And she believed that Chimbashi had broken Marjorie's arm. To Angela he was an accomplice of the Disciplinary Spirit, the providence that presided over the lucklessness of the Claytons and their friends, standing like a signpost at the crossroads with a finger pointing to the unfortunate turning.

"We must get rid of him," I said.

how Aunt Hudson was getting on with her soup.

She's finished it," she said when she came back, "and Iwould like an omelette." The Brebis was not really hurt, only bruised and a little dazed. She thought she heard Uncle Bliss' footsteps.

I was not surprised. I told Angela how infernally rude he had been to her in the summerhouse.

Bliss was not quixotic. I granted her the antithesis in the ideal, but I still felt there was a lurking analogy somewhere. In the illusions, perhaps?

"In harrying Brebis," Angela suggested, which reminded her that it was time to go and see Aunt Huddy again.

66

Clarkson was talking about him to-day. I had not realised how futile he was. A standing joke. He knows about as much natural history as you will find in Pliny."

"Ridiculous in everything except his loyalties."

"Staff, for instance. Bliss' Sancho Panza they call him at the museum."

Angela admitted that Staff would make a creditable Sancho Panza, only the knight was missing. You couldn't have a Sancho Panza without a Quixote.

first really cold evening with an autumnal nip in the air. When Angela rejoined me, I was piling on more logs.

"She is fast asleep," she

said.

Fast asleep. I wondered what she was dreaming about. Two guesses, I was afraid, would cover the field of the Brebis' subliminal adventures -a rude, aggressive, bearded, purple man, and an immensely high and shaky vehicle on the edge of an abyss. But dreams, like cocktails, are generally mixed, and I hoped there was a little allaying archdeacon in it.

"I wish Joan had not let me down," I said.

"Joan let you down? I thought it was the other way."

"Joan or Chimbashi; it is the same thing. What do you think she is dreaming about?"

Angela couldn't imagine. Possibly Uncle Bliss.

I thought I heard a rustle of paper on the writing-table in

corner. There was no draught. I got up and found Chimbashi in possession. The children had left him there in

the innocent guise of a paperweight. I locked him securely in a drawer.

Then I returned to the fire and the bellows. Angela pointed to a white-hot metalliclooking object in the embers, and I fished it out with the tongs. We examined it curiously, but could not make it out at first. It looked like a cigarette-case, but it was too big for Angela's, and I had left mine in the pocket of my coat upstairs. When we had turned it over two or three times and it began to cool, a dragon's eye under a red mane defined itself on the metal. If we had fished a salamander out of the fire we could not have been more startled. It was my cigarettecase, Japanese silver-work, cunningly chased. Angela gave it me. It was her pet dragon, abundant in symbolism. breathed out fire with an enigmatic leer.

"Who put it there?"

It

I was on the point of quoting her familiar adage, but it was superfluous. It more than just showed. Chimbashi had a style of his own; his griffe was unmistakable. There was his signature in the ashes.

He had a balanced mind had Chimbashi. He dealt out malice evenly with both hands, my last present to Angela, and Angela's last present to me. And the morning and the evening were the first day.

element, and covered it decently with ashes, Angela departed sorrowfully to bed. She reminded me to be very careful in seeing that all the doors and windows were fastened.

When she had gone I took down the folio edition of 'Don Quixote' in two volumes, with the Gustave Doré illustrations, translated into French by Louis Viardot, and began to search for the elusive analogy. But I could not find it. Uncle Bliss was a prosaic figure, and deficient in courtesy. He did not seek adventure for the profit of the necessitous. Nor was he emulous of honour. He did not care a rap whether his name was writ in bronze or water. And Dulcinea was not in the picture. Also, I had my suspicions of his liberality. If he won his kingdom, would

Sancho Panza come into his island? I doubted it.

I dozed off with the huge tome on my knees open at the picture of the grand lac de poix-résine bouillant à gros bouillons, dans lequel nagent et s'agitent une infinité de serpents, de couleuvres, de lézards, et mille autres espèces d'animaux féroces et épouvantables. The lanky knight was on the brink ready to dig his spurs into Rosinante, but gazing at pictures in the clouds, not at the lac effrayable which was swarming with dinosaurs and pterodactyls-like the "black hole of death in the

When we had restored our dragon to the fire, its proper

brutes had scented him, and were serpentining up the cliff.

Had I turned the key on

to get out of my chair and look. Uncle Bliss on Rosinante was becoming narrow and elongated; he and his lance were like two peers, one the shadow of the other. A saurian was turning his flank, and there was an octopus coming up behind, both big enough to swallow Rosinante, who, by the way, was looking ominously groggy about the knees.

The tome fell with a thud on the fender, and lay open at the picture of Don Quixote suffering chastisement at the hands of the muleteer. Immortal ironist!

I looked at the plate for a sign, my sortes Virgilianæ, for nobody had asked the tome to open at this page. But I was no nearer a clue. Where was the pathetic parallel? Let the pundits laugh at him as much as they liked, I could not picture Uncle Bliss lying on his broad back in the mud and

What sort of a picture would Doré have made out of the hunter of the pterodactyl? Or Cervantes? Or Milton ? I thought of Samson Agonistes. Again I nodded. Tragedy! Sublimity? No. I was getting colder. The knight of La Mancha was nearer. Pathos. Bathos. And so in a ring. A vicious circle. The analogy evaded me.

Finally I fell asleep and entered a land where things had definite shapes, even abstract things, and you could see into them, and there were no fugitive values, or problems, or doubts. Here I bestrode the shaft of a broken cart and watched Sancho Panza sit on the dinosaur's egg until it hatched and ate him.

THE authors of historical romances of the cloak and sword school owe more than they are in the habit of acknowledging to Master Richard Peeke of Tavistock, in the county of Devon, who in November 1625, all by himself, enjoyed a gorgeous adventure in Spain, and wrote a little pamphlet in 1626 telling his countrymen all about it. For though the modern romancers may never have read Peeke's pamphlet, they have of one accord, in a long line of succession from one generation to another, eagerly adopted an opening paragraph which is calculated, in the immortal words of Pooh Bah, to give an air of verisimilitude to what otherwise might have been a bald and unconvincing narrative. Here it is; my discerning readers will instantly respond to the familiar note which it strikes :

"I know not what the Court of a King means, nor what the fine phrases of Courtiers are. A good Ship I know and a poor Cabin, and the language of a Cannon. And, therefore, as my Breeding has been Rough (scorning Delicacy), and my Present Being consisteth altogether upon the Soldier (blunt, plain, and unpolished), so must

my Writings be, proceeding from fingers fitter for the Pike than the Pen. And so (kind Countrymen) I pray receive them. Neither ought you to expect better from me, because I am but the Chronicler of my own Story."

My friend Richard Peeke of Tavistock was the original begetter of this seductive opening, artfully designed (in other hands) to lull the suspicions of the reader, and to beguile him into believing many things in the subsequent narrative which he would otherwise know to be untrue. We have no reason to suspect the veracity of the good Peeke, highly coloured though his story is. He did, beyond a doubt, sail as a volunteer with Sir Edward Cecil's comedy of an expedition against Cadiz in the autumn of 1625. And he did, also beyond a doubt, publish his pamphlet in or about the following year, addressing it to His Excellent Majesty Charles I., in the piously fulsome language appropriate to the times. An imperfect copy, "Printed at London for I. T., and are to be sold at his Shoppe," and adorned

with an execrable woodcut, lies in the British Museum. An annotated reprint of fifty copies only (of