_Cook._ "IN THESE DAYS WE NEVER SPEAK OF HAVING PEOPLE 'UNDER US.' BUT
I HAVE HAD COLLEAGUES."]

* * * * *

=AN UNLIKELY STORY.=

I am hoping very much that this story will, as Agony Column
advertisements put it, meet the eye of a certain Professor at a
certain Academy of Music. Of course I might tell it to him myself,
as he happens to be my Professor, at least from 7 to 7.45 on Friday
evenings; but it is a story which involves a great deal of explanation
and, well--things on the whole get believed better in print.

To be quite frank I did begin telling him at the time, but I saw that
the first two words had destroyed his faith in the rest of it. I don't
really blame him, for it began with "my cleaner," and I don't suppose
that he has the ghost of an idea that, if you teach cooking, as I do,
under the London County Council, they kindly keep a charlady to wash
up for you and so on, and they call her a "cleaner."

The Professor is a very bad listener. I might have managed to explain
to him what a cleaner is, but I never could have made him see why she
was having tea with me, so I gave it up.

Really it is so simple. She lives at Cambridge Heath; I live at
Croydon, which doesn't sound as countrified but is really so much
nicer that no Croydon people who knew Cambridge Heathers could help
asking them to tea at least once a year, when the garden was at its
best. My cleaner's visit is always very delightful, because she
makes the garden seem at least four times its usual size by sheer
admiration; but this year, just as she was getting into her stride, it
began to rain, and we had to seek refuge by the piano.

We sang "Where the Bee Sucks" and "Annie Laurie" very successfully,
and she at last unthawed to the extent of remarking that she would
give us a "chune," though she "hadn't stood up" to sing by herself
"for donkey's ears." Stipulating that someone should help her out if
the need arose, she investigated the inside of the piano-stool where
the music lives, looking for a suitable song, and made, to her horror,
the discovery that among all the odd pages it contained there was not
one that had ever adhered to a piece called "The Maxeema," nor yet to
a song which asks how someone is "Goin' to keep 'em down on the farm
now they've seen gay Paree?"

The painful incident was passed over at the time, "The Long Trail"
being discovered at the bottom of the pile and satisfactorily
negotia