the week
"except Saturdays."

I go to London, Brighton and South Coast Railway-stations and clamour for
South-Eastern trains. On Bank Holidays I forget it is Bank Holiday, and
go and sit on draughty platforms for hours, waiting for trains that do
not run on Bank Holidays.

To add to my misfortunes, I am the miserable possessor of a demon
time-table that I cannot get rid of, a Bradshaw for August, 1887.
Regularly, on the first of each month, I buy and bring home with me a new
Bradshaw and a new A.B.C. What becomes of them after the second of the
month, I do not know. After the second of the month, I never see either
of them again. What their fate is, I can only guess. In their place is
left, to mislead me, this wretched old 1887 corpse.

For three years I have been trying to escape from it, but it will not
leave me.

I have thrown it out of the window, and it has fallen on people's heads,
and those people have picked it up and smoothed it out, and brought it
back to the house, and members of my family--"friends" they call
themselves--people of my own flesh and blood--have thanked them and taken
it in again!

I have kicked it into a dozen pieces, and kicked the pieces all the way
downstairs and out into the garden, and persons--persons, mind you, who
will not sew a button on the back of my shirt to save me from
madness--have collected the pieces and stitched them carefully together,
and made the book look as good as new, and put it back in my study!

It has acquired the secret of perpetual youth, has this time-table.
Other time-tables that I buy become dissipated-looking wrecks in about a
week. This book looks as fresh and new and clean as it did on the day
when it first lured me into purchasing it. There is nothing about its
appearance to suggest to the casual observer that it is not this month's
Bradshaw. Its evident aim and object in life is to deceive people into
the idea that it is this month's Bradshaw.

It is undermining my moral character, this book is. It is responsible
for at least ten per cent. of the bad language that I use every year. It
leads me into drink and gambling. I am continually finding myself with
some three or four hours to wait at dismal provincial railway stations.
I read all the advertisements on both platforms, and then I get wild and
reckless, and plunge into the railway hotel and play billiards with the
landlord for threes of Scotch.

I intend to have that Bradshaw put i