a, and, foodless, had hid
until he arrived in Rotterdam. Then darkly he had crept on board the
ship and had been discovered at Folkestone. Also when next day I saw
in the pictorial papers a photograph of a boy violinist playing to his
chums, I was not very much surprised to find the title of the photo
was: _The Stowaway Entertains His Companions_. As a matter of fact,
the fiddler wasn't the stowaway at all, but this incident makes me
think hard about history. If a Fleet Street reporter changes one boy
into another, why, we may be all wrong in our history. Henry VIII. may
only have had one wife, and the reporter who interviewed him may have
had so much sack to drink that his vision along with the journalistic
touch may have manufactured the other five. The tale of King Harold
being shot through the eye at the Battle of Hastings may have arisen
from a reporter's using the figurative expression that William the
Conqueror "put his eye out." Nor, after reading the account of the
landing of the Austrian children, can I believe the tale of the
minstrel Taillifer who sprang into the water to lead the Normans in
landing. And as for the time-honoured phrases, "Take away that
bauble!" and "England expects every man to do his duty," I don't
believe they were ever uttered--not now.

I am not singling out journalists as special misreporters. Not one of
us can report an incident truly. There is a good example of this truth
in Swift's _Psychology and Everyday Life_, just published. Swift
prepared a stunt as a test for his adult class. In the midst of a
serious lecture two men and two women students created a disturbance
outside in the lobby, then they burst into the room. One held a banana
pistol-wise at another's head. Swift dropped a toy bomb, and one of
the students staggered back crying: "I'm shot!"

One student dropped a parcel containing a brick, and all yelled and
made much noise. The class was seriously alarmed until they were
assured that the whole affair was a put-up job. Each student was asked
to write an account of what had happened, and the result of their
attempts is so astounding that the reader becomes uncertain whether any
witness in a law-court ever tells the truth. Few, if any, students
could identify one of the wranglers; every account said that the banana
was a real pistol; only one or two saw the brick drop. The strangest
thing was that many were quite sure of the identity of the actors . . .
a