............. 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.
Puzzle I
Can you fold a square piece of paper in such a way that with a single fold it forms a pentagon?
My Solution: Yes, if I knew what a pentagon was.
Puzzle II
A and B agree to hold a walking match across an open meadow, each seeking the shortest line. A, walking from corner to corner, may be said to diangulate the hypotenuse of the meadow. B, allowing for a slight rise in the ground, walks on an obese tabloid. Which wins?
My Solution: Frankly, I don't know.
Puzzle III
(With apologies to the Strand.)
A rope is passed over a pulley. It has a weight at one end and a monkey at the other. There is the same length of rope on either side and equilibrium is maintained. The rope weighs four ounces per foot.
The age of the monkey and the age of the monkey's mother together total four years. The weight of the monkey is as many pounds as the monkey's mother is years old. The monkey's mother was twice as old as the monkey was when the monkey's mother was half as old as the monkey will be when the monkey is three times as old as the monkey's mother was when the monkey's mother was three times as old as the monkey.
The weight of the rope with the weight at the end was half as much again as the difference in weight between the weight of the weight and the weight of the monkey. Now, what was the length of the rope?
My Solution: I should think it would have to be a rope of a fairly good length.
In only one department of English journalism have I met with a decided measure of success; I refer to the juvenile competition department. This is a sort of thing to which the English are especially addicted. As a really educated nation for whom good literature begins in the home they encourage in every way literary competitions among the young readers of their journals. At least half a dozen of the well-known London periodicals carry on this work. The prizes run all the way from one shilling to half a guinea and the competitions are generally open to all children from three to six years of age. It was here that I saw my open opportunity and seized it. I swept in prize after prize. As "Little Agatha" I got four shillings for the best description of Autumn in two lines, and one shilling for guessing correctly the missing letters in BR-STOL, SH-FFIELD, and H-LL. A lot of the competitors fell down on H-LL. I
got six shillings for giving the dates of the Norman Conquest,--1492
A.D., and the Crimean War of 1870. In short, the thing was easy. I
might say that to enter these competitions one has to have a certificate of age from a member of the clergy. But I know a lot of them.
