Page:Tex; a chapter in the life of Alexander Teixeira de Mattos (IA texchapterinlife00mcke).pdf/194



As our logical neighbours across the channel say:

"Zut! Zut! Et encore zut!" ''Had you profited as you ought by the careful bringing up which your kind parents gave you, you would have known that it is for those who go away to say good-bye, for those who arrive to say good-day. You left London before I did. I say no more in reply to your reproaches''

If ever you leave London, however, at about the same time as I, remember, will you not, the etiquette (French) and the punctilio (Italian)?  If you think that I have much to tell you, he adds, 20. 8. 21'', you are mistaken. Y'day I went for a stroll, turned up a footpath which I imagined would bring me back here, found that it didn't, after I had gone much too far to turn back, and plodded on and on—my apprehensive mind full of a picture of myself being devoured by onsticelli and stercoraceous geodurpes amid a fine setting of ferns and bracken—until I reached Abingdon. It might have been Oxford, so exhausted was I.''

''A boy was bribed to fetch me a car and I returned just before the search-party set out for me. I roam no more. There is a lawn here: let me walk up and down it''