I
Now it is as much as their jobs are worth for the authorities
responsible for the amenities of the town not to employ a man on the
clear understanding that every once in a while he climbs to the very top
of Lord Nelson’s column in Trafalgar Square to cleanse away such refuse
as might have collected about the immortal sailor’s feet. And it is to
the good man who undertakes this perilous task that we owe a piece of
information which cannot fail to interest gentles and simples. He tells
how he never but finds numerous pigeons lying dead about the feet of our
sailor hero. Sometimes there will be not more than a score or so,
sometimes there may be close on an hundred, and he relates on oath how
he once removed, in a bag which he takes up with him for that purpose,
the bodies of pigeons to the number of one-hundred-and-thirty-four:
among which, he tells with awe, there was the corpse of a pretty white
dove.
That was on the evening of the first of May of the year of grace 1924,
and the reason why the good man tells with awe of the dove among the
pigeons is because it was on that very evening that he was vexed by a
strange phenomenon. The facts may interest the curious.
The prodigious number of the dead pigeons had kept him at his task much
later than usual; and as he picked up the dove he chanced to look up at
Lord Nelson, who stood at that moment in the light and shadow of the sun
as it set beyond Admiralty Arch, and the good man fancied that the stern
face of my Lord Nelson frowned.
Unseemly though it is to doubt any man’s word, the sceptical sort may be
permitted to question whether the fellow was at that moment seeing
straight, and whether it was not the fanciful light of twilight that had
set him thinking that Lord Nelson had indulged in a passing frown.
But to more kindly folk the good man’s fancy will not present such
marvellous features when they know that it was on the evening of that
first of May that Miss Pamela Wych came upon an event beneath Lord
Nelson’s eyes that completely changed the course of her whole life.