!
Home on leave those particular sounds rasp me as badly as ever. . . .
Moreover I have rather an eye for scamped carpentry: learned it off
my father, going about the property with him. His own eye was a
hawk's for loose fences, loose slates, badly-hung gates, even a
broken sash-cord.

Foe's notions of furnishing, too, had always been bleak. He had
hung his few pictures in the wrong places, and askew at that.
He understood dining, though, and no doubt the dinner was good,
though I gave very little attention to it.

"Otty's hipped to-night," said Collingwood, over the coffee.
"Politics are all he can talk in these days. Wake up, Otty, and
don't sit thinking out a speech."

I woke up. "I don't need to think out a speech," said I. "After a
fortnight's campaigning a fellow can make speeches in his sleep."

"That's just what you're doing; and my fear is, you'll stand up
presently and make one in ours."

"I'm sorry, Jack," I apologised. "Fact is, I'm worried by a
half-promise I made to your man Farrell, over the river--"

"_My_ man Farrell?" says Foe. "Farrell? . . . Farrell? . . . Never
heard of him. Who's Farrell?"

"Never heard of him? . . . Why, Farrell's our candidate over there!
. . . _Your_ candidate; because, if elected, he'll represent you;
because your College and--if you choose to narrow it down--your own
laboratories and lecture-rooms--will belong to his constituency.
The rates on your buildings, the trams that bring your poorer
students, the public money that pays their scholarships--"

"My dear Roddy," he broke in. "You know that I never could get up an
interest in politics. As for local politics--"

That fired me up at once. "Pretty silly sneer, that! Doesn't there
lurk, somewhere down in your consciousness, _some_ sense of belonging
to the first city in the world? . . . Oh, yes, you use it, fast
enough, whenever you go back to Cambridge and play the condescending
metropolitan in Combination Room. _There_, seventy minutes from
Liverpool Street, you pose--yes, _pose_, Jack--as the urbane man,
Horatius Flaccus life-size; whereas your job as a citizen is confined
to cursing the rates, swearing if a pit in the wood pavement jolts
you on the way home from the theatre, supposing it's somebody's
business, supposing there's graft in it, and talking superciliously
of Glasgow and Birmingham, provincial towns, while you can't help to
cheapen the price of a cabbage in Covent Garden!"

"Dear Rodd