And it was in such a mood, after such a decision, on a wet, breathless January evening that I walked homewards past the few melancholy trees that were once part of the proud avenue down which Dick Turpin cantered plunderwards. Why, I asked myself, had I yielded to those instincts of economy that are the only heritage with which my Scots ancestry has thought prudent to endow me; why, for the sake of a few pennies had I deserted the party at the very moment when it was about to become genuinely amusing. Parties are like bonfires: they smoulder wretchedly for a couple of hours; they emit columns of malodorous, unsightly smoke; then suddenly, gloriously, unexpectedly, they burst into a splendour of leaping flame. Such a transformation had been, I now felt, about to enshrine that party for all time in the memory of those present at the very moment when I had decided to desert it. Harold Scott had just arrived from the Everyman Theatre. And than Harold Scott there are few persons who can be, when he so desires, more cheering and more exhilarating. He had regaled himself, not inappropriately, as he had been that evening impersonating Feste, with a stoup of wine, had been led to the piano, and had struck the first chords of “Another Little Job for the Tombstone Maker.” It was a song of which the fame and the refrain had often reached me, the words never: and why, I asked myself, had I allowed to pass so agreeable an opportunity of making their acquaintance. In a mood, therefore, of uncomfortable self-depreciation, cautiously, so that the dog might not bark and awake the household, I opened the front door, to find on the hat cupboard below the window a letter addressed to me in a bright green envelope.