..................... Khalifate;
............. Dog Men of Darfur:
....................... T'chk.
Excellent little thing, isn't it? All it needs is the rhymes. As far as
it goes it has just exactly the ease and the sweep required. And if some
one will tell me how Owen Seaman and those people get the rest of the
ease and the sweep I'll be glad to put it in.
One further experiment of the same sort I made with the English Press in
another direction and met again with failure. If there is one paper in
the world for which I have respect and--if I may say it--an affection,
it is the London Spectator. I suppose that I am only one of thousands
and thousands of people who feel that way. Why under the circumstances
the Spectator failed to publish my letter I cannot say. I wanted no
money for it: I only wanted the honour of seeing it inserted beside the
letter written from the Rectory, Hops, Hants, or the Shrubbery, Potts,
Shrops,--I mean from one of those places where the readers of the
Spectator live. I thought too that my letter had just the right touch.
However, they wouldn't take it: something wrong with it somewhere, I
suppose. This is it:
To the Editor,
The Spectator,
London, England.
Dear Sir,
Your correspondence of last week contained such interesting
information in regard to the appearance of the first cowslip
in Kensington Common that I trust that I may, without
fatiguing your readers to the point of saturation, narrate
a somewhat similar and I think, sir, an equally interesting
experience of my own. While passing through Lambeth Gardens
yesterday towards the hour of dusk I observed a crow with
one leg sitting beside the duck-pond and apparently lost in
thought. There was no doubt that the bird was of the
species pulex hibiscus, an order which is becoming
singularly rare in the vicinity of the metropolis. Indeed,
so far as I am aware, the species has not been seen in
London since 1680. I may say that on recognising the bird I
drew as near as I could, keeping myself behind the
shrubbery, but the pulex hibiscus which apparently caught a
brief glimpse of my face uttered a cry of distress and flew
away.
I am, sir,
Believe me,
yours, sir,
O.Y. Botherwithit.
(Ret'd Major Burmese Army.);
Distressed by these repeated failures, I sank back to a lower level of
English literary work, the puzzle department. For some reason or other
the English delight in puzzles. It is, I think, a part of the peculiar
school-boy pedantry which is the reverse side of their literary genius.
I speak with a certain bitterness because in puzzle work I met with no
success whatever. My solutions were never acknowledged, never paid for,
in fact they were ignored. But I append two or three of them here, with
apologies to the editors of the Strand and other papers who should have
had the honour of publishing them first.