admitted into the collection several pieces, both English and Latin, which fall considerably below mediocrity. A few copies of the work were. privately printed and offered as presents to those friends with whom the author was particularly acquainted. Conclusion of extract.
Further extract from my Manuscript, descriptive. Oratio recta: Trellis stirred feebly in his room in the stillness of the second floor. He frowned to himself quietly in the gloom, flickering his heavy lids and wrinkling his brow into pimpled corrugations. He twitched with his thick fingers at the quilts.
His bed was a timber article of great age in which many of his forefathers had died and been born; it was delicately made and embellished with delicately carved cornices. It was of Italian manufacture, an early excursion of the genius of the great Stradivari. On one side of it was a small table with books and type-darkened papers and on the other a cabinet containing two chambers. Also there was a deal wardrobe and two chairs. On the window-ledge there was a small bakelite clock which grappled with each new day as it entered his room through the window from Peter Place, arranging it with precision into twenty-four hours. It was quiet, servile and emasculated; its twin alarming gongs could be found if looked for behind the dust-laden books on the mantelpiece.
Trellis had three separate suits of sleeping-clothes and was accustomed to be extremely fastidious as to the manner in which they were washed. He supervised the weekly wash, which was carried out by his servant-girl on Tuesdays.
A Tuesday evening at the Red Swan, example of: In the darkness of the early night Trellis arose from his bed and drew a trousers over the bulging exuberance of his night-clothes, swaying on his white worthless legs.
Nature of trousers: Narrow-legged, out-model, the pre-War class.
He groped for his slippers and went out to the dark stairs, stretching an arm for guidance to the banister. He reached the hall-way and continued towards the dark stone stairs to the basement, peering before him with apprehension. Strong basement smells assailed his nostrils, the odours of a washerwoman's fete from a kitchen beflagged with the steamy bunting of underclothes drying. He entered and looked about him from the door. The ceiling was decked with the rectangular banners of his long-tailed shirts, the ensigns of his sheets, the flags of his bed-bibs, the great buff pennants of his drawers.
The figure of Teresa was visible at the stove, her thick thighs presented to the penetration of the fire. She was a stout girl of high colour, attired in grey and divided at the centre by the terminal ridge of a corset of inferior design.
Interjection on the part of Brinsley: He commented at some length on the similarity between the ridge referred to and the moulding-ridge which circumscribed the image of the red swan in the fanlight. Both ridges he advanced as the ineluctable badge of mass-production. Slaveys, he considered, were the Ford cars of humanity; they were created to a standard pattern by the hundred thousand. But they were grand girls and there was nothing he liked better, he said.
Penultimum, continued: Trellis examined his wools with appraising fingers, turning them tenderly in his hands.
Nature of wools: Soft, lacked chafing hardness.
He smiled gratefully on his servant and laboured back to his bedroom, reflectively passing a hand across the pimples of his face. Fearing his bed would cool, he hastened past the emptiness of the hall, where a handsome girl stood poised without her clothes on the brink of a blue river. Napoleon peered at her in a wanton fashion from the dark of the other wall.
Biographical reminiscence, part the second: Some days later I said to my uncle in the morning at breakfast-time:
Could you give me five shillings to buy a book, please?
Five shillings? Well, dear knows it must be a great book altogether that can cost five shillings. What do they call it?
Die