THE BLACK POODLE, By F. Anstey
I have set myself the task of relating in the course of this story,
without suppressing or altering a single detail, the most painful and
humiliating episode of my life.
I do this, not because it will give me the least pleasure, but simply
because it affords me an opportunity of extenuating myself, which has
hitherto been wholly denied to me.
As a general rule, I am quite aware that to publish a lengthy
explanation of one's conduct in any questionable transaction is not the
best means of recovering a lost reputation; but in my own case there
is one to whom I shall nevermore be permitted to justify by word of
mouth—even if I found myself able to attempt it. And as she could
not possibly think worse of me than she does at present, I write this,
knowing it can do me no harm, and faintly hoping that it may come to her
notice and suggest a doubt whether I am quite so unscrupulous a villain,
so consummate a hypocrite, as I have been forced to appear in her eyes.
THE OMNIBUS, By Quiller-Couch
All that follows was spoken in a small tavern, a stone's throw from
Cheapside, the day before I left London. It was spoken in a dull voice,
across a greasy table-cloth, and amid an atmosphere so thick with the
reek of cooking that one longed to change it for the torrid street
again, to broil in an ampler furnace. Old Tom Pickford spoke it, who has
been a clerk for fifty-two years in Tweedy's East India warehouse,
and in all that time has never been out of London, but when he takes a
holiday spends it in hanging about Tweedy's, and observing that unlovely
place of business from the outside. The dust, if not the iron, of
Tweedy's has entered into his soul; and Tweedy's young men know him
as "the Mastodon." He is a thin, bald septuagenarian, with sloping
shoulders, and a habit of regarding the pavement when he walks, so that
he seems to steer his way by instinct rather than sight. In general
he keeps silence while eating his chop; and on this occasion there was
something unnatural in his utterance, a divorce of manner between the
speaker and his words, such as one would expect in a sibyl disclaiming
under stress of the god. I fancied it had something to do with a black
necktie that he wore instead of the blue bird's-eye cravat familiar to
Tweedy's, and with his extraordinary conduct in refusing to-day the chop
that the waiter brought, and limiting his lunch to cheese and lettuce.
Having pulled the lettuce to pieces, he pushed himself back a
little from the table, looked over his spectacles at me, then at the
table-cloth, and began in a dreamy voice:
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