BRIEF DIVERSIONS _Short, but there’s salt in’t...._ THE DOUBLE-DEALER BRIEF DIVERSIONS _being Tales Travesties and Epigrams by_ J. B. PRIESTLEY _Cambridge Bowes & Bowes_ 1922 PUBLISHERS. [Illustration: colophon] CAMBRIDGE. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd. Glasgow: MacLehose, Jackson & Co. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. COPYRIGHT NOTE Nearly _all these pieces have appeared in the_ CAMBRIDGE REVIEW, _and I thank the Editor for his courtesy in allowing me to reprint them. A few travesties and epigrams have been added, and others have been revised. Most of the tales were written during the War, many of them while I was in Flanders, and at that time, being away from books, I imagined I was doing something new, being either ignorant or forgetful of the work of better men, such as Lord Dunsany and Mr T. W. H. Crosland, in a very similar form. To such gentlemen, I can only offer an apology if I seem to enter their little pleasaunces and tread clumsily where they who went before me stepped so lightly and delicately._ J. B. P. CONTENTS TALES _The Impossibility of knowing Everyone_ page 3 _A Moving Story of Real Life_ 4 _The True Account of a Quarrel between a Man we all know and a very old Family_ 5 _At the ‘Red Lion,’ Rample Street_ 7 _The Danger of Accepting Gifts while holding Municipal Office_ 8 _The Humiliating Experience of a Forgotten God_ 10 _How the Rational Amusements of the Great are Limited_ 11 _The Imprudence of a Politician in Travelling Further than the Newspapers_ 12 _The Wrong World_ 14 _The Value of a New Point of View_ 15 _The Uninvited Guest_ 16 _How I met with a Famous Character in a Café_ 18 _The Mutiny_ 19 _Death and the Fiddler_ 20 _The College of Immortal Fame_ 21 _The Lonely Soul_ 23 _The Lost Path_ 24