odotus--a thing one is glad one had once to do,
but one would never willingly do again for any money. We northern
creatures are remote products of the Great Ice Age, and by this time,
like Polar bears, we have grown adapted to our glacial environment. All
the more, therefore, is it a useful shaking-up for us to get
transported bodily from our cramped and poverty-stricken northern
slums, just once in our life, to the palms and temples of the South,
the lands where the human body is a hardy plant, not a frail exotic. We
come back to our chilly home among the fogs and bogs with wider
projects for the thawing down of the social ice-heap, and the
introduction of the bread-fruit-tree and the currant-bun-bush into the
remotest wilds of the borough of Hackney. I am not even quite sure that
tropical experience doesn't predispose us somewhat in favour of
planting the sweet potato instead of grazing battering-rams in the
uplands of Connemara. But hush; I hear an editorial frown. No more of
this heresy.

ON THE WINGS OF THE WIND.

Of course, you know my friend the squirting cucumber. If you don't,
that can be only because you've never looked in the right place to find
him. On all waste ground outside most southern cities--Nice, Cannes,
Florence: Rome, Algiers, Granada: Athens, Palermo, Tunis, where you
will--the soil is thickly covered by dark trailing vines which bear on
their branches a queer hairy green fruit, much like a common cucumber
at that early stage of its existence when we know it best in the
commercial form of pickled gherkins. As long as you don't interfere
with them, these hairy green fruits do nothing out of the common in the
way of personal aggressiveness. Like the model young lady of the books
on etiquette, they don't speak unless they're spoken to. But if
peradventure you chance to brush up against the plant accidentally, or
you irritate it of set purpose with your foot or your cane, then, as
Mr. Rider Haggard would say, 'a strange thing happens': off jumps the
little green fruit with a startling bounce, and scatters its juice and
pulp and seeds explosively through a hole in the end where the stem
joined on to it. The entire central part of the cucumber, in short
(answering to the seeds and pulp of a ripe melon), squirts out
elastically through the breach in the outer wall, leaving the hollow
shell behind as a mere empty windbag.

Naturally, the squirting cucumber knows its own bu