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[Footnote A:
Publisher

: But you don’t give the verses.

Author : I know. It’s a little idea I got from an excellent Sunday newspaper.]

George Leghorn was an Albino, but his figure was very graceful. From the specimen which I have already given, it will be easy to believe that his wit was fluorescent, detergent, and vibratory. He afterwards became a well-known personality on the turf. He gained a considerable fortune by laying the odds; his family were all reputed to be good layers.

Dear old Peter Cochin was staunch and true. He reminds me of something that my illustrious model says of another man. She says that he “would risk telling me or anyone he loved, before confiding to an inner circle, faults which both he and I think might be corrected.” Grammar was no doubt made for slaves–not for the brilliant and autobiographical. All the same, a prize should be offered to anybody who can find the missing “risk” in mentioning to another a point on which both are agreed.

She adds that she has had “a long experience of inner circles.” There, it must be admitted, she is ahead of me. But the only inner circle of which I have had a long experience has been much improved since it was electrified.

In congratulating Peter upon a new appointment, with three under him, I asked when I first met him. His reply was particularly staunch, and I quote from it:

“It was in May 28, 1913. The hour was 1.38.5 Greenwich Time, and I shall never forget it. You were sixteen then, and the effect as you came into the room was quintessential. Suddenly the sunlight blazed, the electric light went on automatically till the fuses gave way, the chimney caught fire, the roof fell in, the petrol tank exploded, old R–y said that he should never care to speak to his wife again, and the butler dropped the Veuve Clicquot. After that the shooting party came in, but for some reason or other the sentence was not carried out.”

I have very few staunch friends, and many of them have had to be discarded from weakness; but when they are staunch–well, they really are. The only trouble with Peter Cochin was that he was too cautious. He was given to under-statement. I do not think he gives a really full and rich idea of the effect I habitually produced.

I sometimes think that I am almost too effective. Still, as I said before, the Latin word “margo” does mean “the limit.”

FIFTH EXTRACT

MISFIRES

My family had a curious dread that I should marry a groom. I never did. To be quite honest, I never had the opportunity. But I did get engaged to quite a lot of other things.

My first engagement was when I was very, very young. He was a humorous man, and perhaps I was wrong in taking him so seriously. Still, he must have adored me. When I accepted him his hair turned completely white–an infallible test of the depth of emotion.

He was an excellent whip. It used to be a wonderful sight to see him taking a pair of young horses down Ludgate Hill on a greasy day at noon, with the whole road chock-a-block with traffic, lighting a pipe with a wooden match with one hand, carrying on an animated conversation with the other with a fare on the front seat, dropping white-hot satire on the heads of drivers less efficient than himself, and always getting the ‘bus through safely with about an inch to spare on each side.

On the other hand, he was almost entirely ignorant of Marcus Aurelius, Henry James, Step-dancing, Titian, the Manners and Customs of Polite Society, Factory-Girl Reclamation, Cardinal Newman, or the Art of Self-advertisement. He said, with an entire absence of pretension, that these things were not on his route.