The small man gazed on Lord Asquith with beaming admiration. "That's what I like about you English," he said. "You cover your emotions so well. How do you do it?" But Lord Asquith didn't answer. Suddenly he was too busy giving vent to an emotion that wasn't even thinly veiled, let alone covered. As he caught sight of the monument pulling away from the earth and bobbing upward like a cork in water, he reached to the street lamp for support. "Look at that thing leap about!" he gasped. The little man looked and joined his lordship at the lamp. "Gord!" he groaned, closing his eyes tightly. "I've had a snootfull in my day, but never anything like this!" * * * * * By this time, others along the street had begun to recover sufficiently from the shock of the explosion to notice that something terribly strange was going on in the vicinity of the Whittle monument. A chorused cry of stunned surprise moved, in chain reaction, along the street and rose to a babble of hysteria. In this rising tide of excitement, a taxi driver, unaware that he had gotten himself caught in anything more than an after theatre jam, directed his vehicle into the square, proceeded to the center, then glanced out the window to signal for a turn around the monument. He glanced, looked away, then glanced again. He shoved the whole upper portion of his body out the window and stared with blinking incredulity at the rising monument. He forgot completely about the taxi and the lady passenger in the back. A greater scream rose through the crowd as the taxi toured complacently across the square, over the sidewalk, and lodged itself crashingly in the aquarium fitted window of a seafood restaurant. The driver remained oblivious to all but the uprooted monument, even as the windshield gave way before a deluge of salt water and flopping fish. Not so, however, his passenger who suddenly found herself staring nose to nose with a gimlet-eyed mackerel, who was peering up at her rather evilly from inside the front of her dress. With a scream that echoed to the very heavens, the lady hurled back the door of the taxi and leaped to the sidewalk. There, before an enchanted group of onlookers, she began to clutch at herself with all the mad frenzy of a native dancer engaged in ceremonial rites dedicated to the god of human fertility. Reaching low within her dress, she withdrew the floundering fish and hurled it from her with a vengeance.