ENDPAPERS
Another Part of the Forest
By STRIX MY prowess as a sleeper first attracted attention during Zeppelin raids on London in the First World War. When these started our household prudently repaired to the wine-cellar; but the pristine excitement soon wore off and after that it proved virtually impossible to wake me up
and get me to join in the 3`414ve qui peut. My bedroom was at the top of the house, nobody was particularly keen on Carrying me down five flights of stairs, and in e end I was, allowed to go on hogging it, a ,,I3,rivilege which in no time at all was being `:aimed by everyone else under our roof. (The Pa remained intact; but one morning we did i)nd a very, very small piece of shrapnel on the front doorstep.) This early promise has, Dam glad to say, been maintained; if they ever include a sleeping con- test in the Olympic Games I shouldn't be at all surprised if you see the veteran Strix marching round the arena with the other British athletes, wearing a little Union Jack on his pyjamas.
IlarUm Thus my wife had her usual difficulty in
:here's me at two o'clock in the morning. '4ere's somebody moving about outside,' she 'aid. I never really mastered the system of ,grading intellligence with (a) a letter denoting _,`e reliability of the source and (b) a numeral denoting the credibility of the information (Al uelog, of course, the best), but I put this report at about B4; our house is a long way from anYvvhere. Never mind,' I said, and was about to dis- play my virtuosity by going fast asleep again vuen remembered something. Several years ago we were burgled by two Stuart fellows who borrowed a ladder from the larage and who, though arrested in London a °W hours later, had by then got rid of the swag. Afterwards it emerged that one of them had been the by an old ploughman casing the joint from b ° lane behind the house. What I now remem- bered was that on the previous afternoon I had youngish, a man apparently doing just this—a rungish, respectably dressed man, with what toaked like a map under his arm, gazing in- :411Y over the hedge at my domicile, with his sar Parked a short distance away. There was for just sufficiently anomalous about him i„."' Me to half-decide to stop the car and ask an appropriately whimsical tone, if he was by CY chance a burglar; but I thought better of ' and when I came back he had gone. )ceursion The memory of this stranger succeeded where, v .hears ago, the Zeppelins had failed. I got up, .,,` on a pair of slippers and padded downstairs out into the woods behind the house. It was si; still, starlit night, broken only by the kes-wick, e's-wick of a young tawny owl. There was no
sight or sound of the criminal classes, and after a bit I went back to bed, without even (to make a pointless anecdote still more pointless) having had the courage—or perhaps the lack of self- consciousness—to adopt a procedure which I have long believed suitable for such occasions. I had not drawn my sword.
This trusty weapon lies, for no valid reason, on a table in the hall, together with part of a salmon-gaff, a lady's umbrella, an heirloom-type silver-headed cane and a floating population of walking sticks and hunting crops. I hold the theory that, if one did have to deal with burglars, a sword would be the thing to deal with them with. A revolver—if loaded—is too lethal; a shot- gun, besides suffering from the same disadvan- tage, is too valuable to be exposed to damage in a mêlée. The moral effect of the arme blanche is not a legend, a sword has a longer reach than a cosh, and I believe that, if one did confront an intruder in one's own house, one's native timidity would be overcome with righteous indig- nation and one might, if the need seemed to arise, nerve oneself to give the dastard a little tenta- tive poke with the sharp end. But it doesn't look, on the form to date, as if I shall ever put this theory to the test; perhaps this is just as well.
As I got back into bed a car started up in the woods, about a quarter of a mile away, and whined swiftly away into the silent night. Moments later I was back in the Land of Nod.
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