's your share of the
picture-postcards. Are we all dining with this Mr. Masquerier to-night?'

'Yes!' said we all.

* * * * *

If Woodhouse knew nothing of journalism, young Ollyett, who had
graduated in a hard school, knew a good deal. Our halfpenny evening
paper, which we will call _The Bun_ to distinguish her from her
prosperous morning sister, _The Cake_, was not only diseased but
corrupt. We found this out when a man brought us the prospectus of a new
oil-field and demanded sub-leaders on its prosperity. Ollyett talked
pure Brasenose to him for three minutes. Otherwise he spoke and wrote
trade-English--a toothsome amalgam of Americanisms and epigrams. But
though the slang changes the game never alters, and Ollyett and I and,
in the end, some others enjoyed it immensely. It was weeks ere we could
see the wood for the trees, but so soon as the staff realised that they
had proprietors who backed them right or wrong, and specially when they
were wrong (which is the sole secret of journalism), and that their fate
did not hang on any passing owner's passing mood, they did miracles.

But we did not neglect Huckley. As Ollyett said our first care was to
create an 'arresting atmosphere' round it. He used to visit the village
of week-ends, on a motor-bicycle with a side-car; for which reason I
left the actual place alone and dealt with it in the abstract. Yet it
was I who drew first blood. Two inhabitants of Huckley wrote to
contradict a small, quite solid paragraph in _The Bun_ that a hoopoe had
been seen at Huckley and had, 'of course, been shot by the local
sportsmen.' There was some heat in their letters, both of which we
published. Our version of how the hoopoe got his crest from King Solomon
was, I grieve to say, so inaccurate that the Rector himself--no
sportsman as he pointed out, but a lover of accuracy--wrote to us to
correct it. We gave his letter good space and thanked him.

'This priest is going to be useful,' said Ollyett. 'He has the impartial
mind. I shall vitalise him.'

Forthwith he created M.L. Sigden, a recluse of refined tastes who in
_The Bun_ demanded to know whether this Huckley-of-the-Hoopoe was the
Hugly of his boyhood and whether, by any chance, the fell change of name
had been wrought by collusion between a local magnate and the railway,
in the mistaken interests of spurious refinement. 'For I knew it and
loved it with the maidens of my day--_eheu ab angulo!_--