Snowdrops from a Curate’s Garden

that you see no moral difference between the em- ployment of a horse and a motor car would, at a time when your services were less necessary than at present, expose you to the gravest reprimand from the Censor of Plays, or possibly the London County Council, while I myself as a scientist should feel obliged to remind you that in the pre- sent state of our knowledge we are not acquainted with any means by which the motor car is able to reproduce its species. So he spoke, while I la- boured at the foaming oyster-catcher before me. I was now — it was the fifteenth day since the last relief party had fallen, for all England was now up in arms against what their freeborn spirit consid- ered an unwarrantable and tyrannical demand on their manhood — it is a good thing, said George W.....m himself, to have a giant’s strength, but tyr- annous to use it like a giant — while the sporting instinct of the race was equally aroused, and they were as one man (so the Pink ’Un voiced the gener- ous feeling of the community) in their resolve “ to stand away, and let’s see the Frenchy have his whack out ” — I was now, in the words of the sweet singer of Israel, faint yet pursuing, (I was but a boy !) when a yell of rage, like that of a famished tiger, resounded through the palace. Dashing aside all opposition, passive though it was, for the waiting-women could not get out of the way quickly enough, there rushed into the room a dark and gigantic mass of brawn. I was torn, regardless of the ligature, from my unsavoury perch, flung, in spite of my tender years, to the floor, and with a roar like the crash of a universe in its death-pang, a vast and hairy gut-stick plunged into the yawn- ing abyss which the lobster-pot of the gluttonous Guelph offered to its raging lust. Instantly a volley of viscous baby-juice spurted from the loose cor- ners of the now delighted whim-wham, and a yell of obscene bawdy-talk from the crapulous and [40]