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grass. I’ll shout.’ His face was distorted in terror. A red spot appeared on either cheek bone and spread over his face.
    I put my fingers to my ears and ran out of the scoringbox. I had run perhaps twenty yards, when an indescribable pang of fire spun me about and left me dazed and numbed. I escaped death somehow; I suppose that I am lucky, like the Richard of the story. But the lightning struck Crossley and the doctor dead.
    Crossley’s body was found rigid, the doctor’s was crouched in a corner, his hands to his ears. Nobody could understand this because death hadbeen instantaneous, and the doctor was not a man to stop his ears against thunder.
    It makes a rather unsatisfactory end to the story to say that Rachel and Richard were the friends with whom I was staying – Crossley had described them most accurately – but that when I told them that a man called Charles Crossley had been struck at the same time as their friend the doctor, they seemed to takeCrossley’s death casually by comparison with his. Richard looked blank; Rachel said: ‘Crossley? I think that was the man who called himself the Australian Illusionist and gave that wonderful conjuring show the other day. He had practically no apparatus but a black silk handkerchief. I liked his face so much. Oh, and Richard didn’t like it at all.’
    ‘No, I couldn’t stand the way he looked at youall the time,’ Richard said.

Avocado Pears
    TOM’S FATHER WAS a respectable chemist in Birmingham, an old-style Christian Socialist, and Tom, who went as day-boy to a local grammar-school and did brilliantly and came up to Oxford with a scholarship and had no friends there except among the serious Labour crowd at Ruskin College, was surprisingly ignorant of certain perverse but familiar facts of life. One day he came to borrowmy French dictionary. I asked him what he wanted to look up. ‘Just the name of a fruit,’ he said carelessly. But someone else had borrowed the dictionary. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. Then he told me the story.
    ‘A month ago I was in Paris for a week-end, and I was wandering about vaguely looking at things the evening I arrived – I had never been in Paris before. I walked steadily in one directionuntil I came to a very poor quarter – I don’t know where, but it was somewhere in the northern part. The streets were narrow and full of garbage. After a time I came on two policemen: they were busy kicking a man who was lying in the gutter. He had a pretty long wound in his scalp and looked bad; certainly he hadn’t any fight left in him. I ran up and took a flying kick at the bigger of thepolicemen, from behind, and sent him sprawling, and then I took a standing kick at the other and sent him sprawling, too. They were lovely kicks; modelled on those long shots at goal by Dorrell of “The Villa”. The policemen saw I was angry so they ran away.
    ‘I wasn’t wearing a hat – I never do – and wore a muffler round my neck so the man’s friends came up from where they had been hiding in adoorway – they were Communists – and began embracing me and slapping me on the back. When I answered in English they were surprised at first, but said:
“Vous êtes bon camarade, tout de même.
” They explained that they hadn’t attacked the policemen, because they carried revolvers and generally weren’t afraid to use them. This was all right for me. So we went to a pub and they gave me coffee – Idon’t drink, as you know. The brother of the man whom I had rescued came up later. He was a printer’s foreman, he told me, and could talk a little English. He said how grateful he was and offered to show me the sights of Paris. First he took me round the slum parts – my God ! it
was
a filthy place. It even beat what I saw while I washelping with that survey of housing conditions in Glasgow forthe Labour Research Bureau. “Well, now let’s look at the prettier part,” I said. “I’ll find the money.” The printer laughed and