[Illustration: _Lady (to applicant for situation as cook)._ "HAVE YOU BEEN ACCUSTOMED TO HAVE A KITCHEN-MAID UNDER YOU?" _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 negotiated, and I forgot all about it until the next Friday evening, when, just as I was about to shake the dust of Cambridge Heath off my shoes, my cleaner, rising from her scrubbing, wiped her hands on her apron, produced two large limp sheets of white paper which resolved themselves into the music I ought to have had and hadn't, and pressed them upon me with all the eagerness of a more than cheerful giver.