bring home
to me the perilous nature of my enterprise. It set me thinking of all the
other things that could happen to a man out and about on a velocipede
without a lamp after lighting-up time. In particular, I recalled the
statement of a pal of mine that in certain sections of the rural
districts goats were accustomed to stray across the road to the extent of
their chains, thereby forming about as sound a booby trap as one could
well wish.

He mentioned, I remember, the case of a friend of his whose machine got
entangled with a goat chain and who was dragged seven miles--like
skijoring in Switzerland--so that he was never the same man again. And
there was one chap who ran into an elephant, left over from a travelling
circus.

Indeed, taking it for all in all, it seemed to me that, with the possible
exception of being bitten by sharks, there was virtually no front-page
disaster that could not happen to a fellow, once he had allowed his dear
ones to override his better judgment and shove him out into the great
unknown on a push-bike, and I am not ashamed to confess that, taking it
by and large, the amount of quailing I did from this point on was pretty
considerable.

However, in respect to goats and elephants, I must say things panned out
unexpectedly well.

Oddly enough, I encountered neither. But when you have said that you have
said everything, for in every other way the conditions could scarcely
have been fouler.

Apart from the ceaseless anxiety of having to keep an eye skinned for
elephants, I found myself much depressed by barking dogs, and once I
received a most unpleasant shock when, alighting to consult a signpost, I
saw sitting on top of it an owl that looked exactly like my Aunt Agatha.
So agitated, indeed, had my frame of mind become by this time that I
thought at first it was Aunt Agatha, and only when reason and reflection
told me how alien to her habits it would be to climb signposts and sit on
them, could I pull myself together and overcome the weakness.

In short, what with all this mental disturbance added to the more purely
physical anguish in the billowy portions and the calves and ankles, the
Bertram Wooster who eventually toppled off at the door of Kingham Manor
was a very different Bertram from the gay and insouciant _boulevardier_
of Bond Street and Piccadilly.

Even to one unaware of the inside facts, it would have been evident that
Kingham Manor was throwing its weight about a bit ton