Page:Buchan - The Thirty-Nine Steps (Grosset Dunlap, 1915).djvu/14



RETURNED from the City about three o'clock on that May afternoon pretty well disgusted with life. I had been three months in the old country, and was fed up with it. If anyone had told me a year ago that I would have been feeling like that I should have laughed at him, but there was the fact. The weather made me liverish, the talk of the ordinary Englishman made me sick, I couldn't get enough exercise, and the amusements of London seemed as flat as soda-water that has been standing in the sun. "Richard Hannay," I kept telling myself, "you have got into the wrong ditch, my friend, and you had better climb out."