Tobamori by Saaki, bred by Mike Bennett.

It was a chill, rain-washed afternoon of a late August day, that indefinite season when partridges are still in security or cold storage, and there is nothing to hunt unless one is bounded on the north

by the Bristol channel in which case one may lawfully gallop after fat red stags. Lady Blemley's house party was not bounded on the

north by the Bristol Channel, hence there was a full gathering of her guests round the tea table on this particular afternoon.

And in spite of the blankness of the season and the triteness of the occasion,

there was no trace in the company of that fatigued restlessness, which

means a dread of the Pianola, and a subdued hankering for auction bridge.

The undisguised open-mouthed attention of the entire party was fixed on the homely negative

personality of Mr Cornelius Apin.

Of all her guests, he was the one who had come to Lady Blemly with the vaguest reputation.

Someone had said he was clever, and he had got his invitation

in the moderate expectation, on the part of his hostess,

that some portion at least of his cleverness, would be contributed

to the general entertainment. Until tea time that day, she had been unable to discover in what direction, if any, his cleverness lay.

He was neither a wit nor a croquet champion, a hypnotic force, nor a begetta of amateur theatricals.

Neither did his exterior suggest the sort of man in whom women are willing to pardon a generous

measure of mental deficiency. He had subsided into mere Mr.

Apin and the Cornelius seemed a piece of transparent baptismal bluff.

And now he was claiming to have looked apparent baptismal bluff.

And now he was claiming to have launched on the world a discovery beside which the invention of

gunpowder, of the

steam locomotion were inconsiderable trifles.

...