to Paston Oatvile, and even his ill-wishers admitted that his game was improving. That Mr. Carmichael, the fourth member of the party, had been a don you knew as soon as he opened his mouth. There was that precision in his utterances, that benignity in his eye, that spontaneity in his willingness to impart information, that no other profession breeds. A perpetual fountain of interesting small-talk, he unnerved his audience with a sense of intellectual repletion which was worse than boredom. Not that he talked the “shop” of the learned: his subject had been Greek archæology; his talk was of county families, of travels in the Near East, of the processes by which fountain-pens are manufactured, of county families again. He was over sixty—he, alone of the party, was married, and lived in one of the bungalows with a colourless wife, who seemed to have been withered by long exposure to the sirocco of his conversation: at the moment she was absent, and he was lodging in the dormy-house like the rest. It must be confessed that his fellow-members shunned him, but he was useful upon occasion as a last court of appeal on any matter of fact; it was he who could remember what year it was the bull got loose on the links, and what ball the Open Championship was won with three years back. Marryatt (that was the clergyman, yes; I see you are a proper reader for a detective-story) rose once more and took a good look at the weather. The fog was lifting, but the rain still fell pitilessly. “I shouldn’t wonder,” he said, “if we had some showers before nightfall.” “It’s a curious thing,” said Carmichael, “that the early Basque poets always speak of the night not as falling but as rising. I suppose they had a right to look at it that way. Now, for myself———” Marryatt, fortunately, knew him well enough to interrupt him. “It’s the sort of afternoon,” he said darkly, “on which one wants to murder somebody, just to relieve one’s feelings.” “You would be wrong,” said Reeves. “Think of the footmarks you’d be bound to leave behind you in mud like this. You would be caught in no time.” “Ah, you’ve been reading _The Mystery of the Green Thumb_. But tell me, how many murderers have really been discovered by their footprints? The bootmakers have conspired to make the human race believe that there are only about half a dozen different sizes of feet, and we all have to cram ourselves into horrible boots of one uniform pattern, imported by the gross from America. What does Holmes do next?” “Well, you see,” put in Gordon, “the detectives in the book always have the luck. The murderer generally has a wooden leg, and that doesn’t take much tracing. The trouble in real life is the way murderers go about unamputated. And then there’s the left-handed men, how conveniently they come in! I tried detection once on an old pipe, and I could show you from the way the side of it was charred that the owner of it was right-handed. But there are so many right-handed people.”