mbles.

Thus might I some day feel that all this anguish was really a
blessing--effectively disguised.

But I doubted it.

We were none of us very cheerful now at the farm. Even Ukridge's
spirit was a little daunted by the bills which poured in by every
post. It was as if the tradesmen of the neighborhood had formed a
league and were working in concert. Or it may have been due to thought
waves. Little accounts came not in single spies but in battalions. The
popular demand for a sight of the color of his money grew daily. Every
morning at breakfast he would give us fresh bulletins of the state of
mind of each of our creditors, and thrill us with the announcement
that Whiteley's were getting cross and Harrod's jumpy, or that the
bearings of Dawlish, the grocer, were becoming over-heated. We lived
in a continual atmosphere of worry. Chicken and nothing but chicken
at meals, and chicken and nothing but chicken between meals, had
frayed our nerves. An air of defeat hung over the place. We were a
beaten side, and we realized it. We had been playing an uphill game
for nearly two months, and the strain was beginning to tell. Ukridge
became uncannily silent. Mrs. Ukridge, though she did not understand,
I fancy, the details of the matter, was worried because Ukridge was.
Mrs. Beale had long since been turned into a soured cynic by the lack
of chances vouchsafed her for the exercise of her art. And as for me,
I have never since spent so profoundly miserable a week. I was not
even permitted the anodyne of work. There seemed to be nothing to do
on the farm. The chickens were quite happy, and only asked to be let
alone and allowed to have their meals at regular intervals. And every
day one or more of their number would vanish into the kitchen, and
Mrs. Beale would serve up the corpse in some cunning disguise, and we
would try to delude ourselves into the idea that it was something
altogether different.

There was one solitary gleam of variety in our menu. An editor sent me
a check for a guinea for a set of verses. We cashed that check and
trooped round the town in a body, laying out the money. We bought a
leg of mutton and a tongue and sardines and pineapple chunks and
potted meat and many other noble things, and had a perfect banquet.

After that we relapsed into routine again.

Deprived of physical labor, with the exception of golf and
bathing--trivial sports compared with work in the fowl runs at its
hardest--I tried to ma