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NEVER go to the tool-chest in the laundry cupboard, in a hasty dive after nails of specified sizes, or the screw-driver which has such facility for getting itself lost, without recoiling under the sound of two mournful notes that make accusing appeal to me out of the horrid, rasping miscellany of that box. They proceed from the two kid-covered bellows that in happier days produced the soft coo-coo of our lamented Swiss clock.

I shudder when I hear them. It makes me think of lost souls. You may regard it a just retribution for ever possessing so childish a thing as a cuckoo-clock. But it wasn't my fault. It was a present. A relative aged seventeen, who "went over" just before the war, brought it as her chief trophy from a flying visit to Switzerland. I will not say it was entirely for her sake we adopted it. We certainly were short of clocks in our house, and a most appropriate place presented itself