happened that the new customer actually was that well-known trainer. He seemed to think that Spearmint had taken a liberty with his name, and even to resent it.

Spearmint did not lose the sight of the left eye, as was at one time feared, but his looks have never been quite the same since his nose was broken.

My next brother, Orby, was born in 1870. He could do the most graceful and charming things. When his namesake won the Derby in 1907, he immediately acquired a complimentary Irish accent, and employed it in the narration of humorous stories. An accent acquired at the age of thirty-seven is perhaps liable to lack conviction, and I always thought that my brother was over-scrupulous in beginning every sentence with the word “Bedad.” Like myself, he simply did not know what fear was, and in consequence told his Irish stories in his own Irish accent to a real Irishman. However, now that he has got his new teeth in you would never know that he had been hit. It was said of him by a great legal authority—I forget in which police-court—that he had the best manners and the least honesty of any taxi-driver on the Knightsbridge rank.

Another brother, Sunstar, acquired considerable reputation by his skill in legerdemain. If you lent him a watch or a coin, with one turn of his hand he would make it disappear; he could do the same thing when you had not lent it. He could make anything disappear that was not absolutely screwed to the floor, and at public-houses where he was known the pewter from which he drank was always chained to the bar. He had something of my own quixotic nature, and would probably have taken the rest if he had wanted it. One day at Ascot he made a stranger’s watch disappear. When he came to examine his newly-acquired property he was disappointed to find that the watch was a four-and-sixpenny American Everbright—“Puts you wrong, Day and night.” He was on the point of throwing it away when the kindly thought came to him that perhaps the stranger attached some sentimental value to that watch; indeed, there seemed to be no other possible reason for wearing it. Sunstar determined to replace the watch in the stranger’s pocket. He did his best, but he was far more practised in removing than in replacing. The stranger—a hulking, cowardly brute—caught my brother with his hand in his pocket, and failed to grasp the altruism of his motives, and that is why poor Sunnie walks a little lame.

He is not with us at present. He had made quite a number of things disappear, and a censorious world is ever prone to judge by disappearances. It became expedient—and even necessary—for my brother to make himself disappear, and he did so.

The Second Extract, as they say on the film, will follow immediately.

Second Extract

EBULLIENT YOUTH

I have been studying the beautiful pages of the autobiography of my Great Example—hereinafter to be called the G.E. It is wonderful to be admitted to the circle of the elect, week after week, at the low rate of twopence a time. Why, I’ve paid more to see the pictures.

Considering the price, one ought not to carp. The G.E. says in one extract that she has lost every female friend she ever had, with the exception of four. In a subsequent extract she names six women whose friendship has remained loving and true to her since girlhood. She speaks of a four-line stanza as a couplet. She imputes a “blasphemous tirade” to a great man of science who certainly never uttered one. She says that she had a conversation with Lord Salisbury about the fiscal controversy, in which he took no part, the year after his death. But why make a fuss about little things like this? If you write in bed at the rate of one thousand words an hour, accidents are sure to happen.

But there is just one of the G.E.’s sentences that is worrying me and keeping me awake at night. Here it is—read it carefully:

“I wore the shortest of tweed skirts, knickerbockers of the same stuff, top-boots, a cover-coat, and a coloured scarf round my head.”

And all very nice too, no doubt. But consider the terrific problem involved.

She does not say that the skirt and knickerbockers were made of the same kind of stuff. If she had, I could have understood it, and my natural delicacy would for ever have kept me from the slightest allusion to the subject.

What she does say is that the skirt and knickerbockers were made of the same stuff. That is very different, and involves hideous complications.

Firstly, it must mean that the knickerbockers were made out of the skirt. Well, there may have been surplus material from that coloured scarf, and it is not for me to say. But, secondly, it must also mean that the skirt was made out of the knickerbockers. Oh, help!

No, I positively refuse. I will not say another word. There are limits. Only an abstruse theologian with a taste for the more recondite niceties of obscure heresies could possibly do justice to it.

All change, please. The next item on the programme will be a succinct account of my ebullient girlhood.

I cannot say that I loved the Warren, my ancestral home. The neighbours called it the Warren, but I can’t think why. The Post Office said it was No. 4, Catley Mews, Kentish Town, and dear papa—who always had the mot juste—sometimes said that it was hell.

We were a high-spirited family with clean-cut personalities, penetrating voices, short tempers, high nervous tension, and small feet. Don’t you wish you were like that?

All the same, there were only the four rooms over the stable. At times there were fifteen or sixteen of us at home, and also the lodger—I shall speak of him presently. And when you have five personal quarrels, baby, the family wash, a sewing-machine, three mouth-organs, fried bacon, and a serious political argument occurring simultaneously in a restricted establishment, something has to go. As a rule, dear papa went. He would make for Regent’s Park, and find repose in the old-world calm of the parrot-house at the Zoo.

But there is always room on the top—it is a conviction on which I have ever acted. When I felt too cramped and stifled in the atmosphere of the Warren, I would climb out on the roof. There, with nothing on but my nightgown, tennis shoes, and the moonlight, I would dance frenetically. The tiles would break loose beneath my gossamer tread and, accompanied by sections of gutter, go poppity-swish into the street below and hit all manner of funny things. I fancy that some of the funny things complained. I know the police called, and I seem to remember rather a nasty letter from the landlord’s agent. I had a long interview with mamma on the subject. She pointed out that if I slipped and fell I should probably make a nasty dent in the pavement, and with many tears I promised to relinquish the practice.

I used to ride on the Heath when I had the opportunity, but I cannot pretend that I was up to the standard of the G.E. I do not think I ever rode up a staircase. I certainly never threw my horse down on the marble floor of the hall of the Warren. There were several reasons for this. Firstly, the Warren had not got a hall, and if it had had a hall, the hall would not have had a marble floor. Secondly, the horses I rode were likely to be wanted again, being in fact the ponies that unsuspecting tradesmen stabled at Catley Mews. Bogey Nutter looked after them, and I could always do what I liked with Bogey. He was perhaps the most profuse proposer I ever met. At one time he always proposed to me once a day and twice on Bank holidays. I was such a dashing, attractive