on't know what they are
talking about. Driving here in the car today to award the kind prizes, I
was reluctantly compelled to tick off my host on this very point. Old Tom
Travers. You will see him sitting there in the second row next to the
large lady in beige."

He pointed helpfully, and the hundred or so Market Snods-buryians who
craned their necks in the direction indicated were able to observe Uncle
Tom blushing prettily.

"I ticked him off properly, the poor fish. He expressed the opinion that
the world was in a deplorable state. I said, 'Don't talk rot, old Tom
Travers.' 'I am not accustomed to talk rot,' he said. 'Then, for a
beginner,' I said, 'you do it dashed well.' And I think you will admit,
boys and ladies and gentlemen, that that was telling him."

The audience seemed to agree with him. The point went big. The voice that
had said, "Hear, hear" said "Hear, hear" again, and my corn chandler
hammered the floor vigorously with a large-size walking stick.

"Well, boys," resumed Gussie, having shot his cuffs and smirked horribly,
"this is the end of the summer term, and many of you, no doubt, are
leaving the school. And I don't blame you, because there's a froust in
here you could cut with a knife. You are going out into the great world.
Soon many of you will be walking along Broadway. And what I want to
impress upon you is that, however much you may suffer from adenoids, you
must all use every effort to prevent yourselves becoming pessimists and
talking rot like old Tom Travers. There in the second row. The fellow
with a face rather like a walnut."

He paused to allow those wishing to do so to refresh themselves with
another look at Uncle Tom, and I found myself musing in some little
perplexity. Long association with the members of the Drones has put me
pretty well in touch with the various ways in which an overdose of the
blushful Hippocrene can take the individual, but I had never seen anyone
react quite as Gussie was doing.

There was a snap about his work which I had never witnessed before, even
in Barmy Fotheringay-Phipps on New Year's Eve.

Jeeves, when I discussed the matter with him later, said it was something
to do with inhibitions, if I caught the word correctly, and the
suppression of, I think he said, the ego. What he meant, I gathered, was
that, owing to the fact that Gussie had just completed a five years'
stretch of blameless seclusion among the newts, all the goofiness which
ought to ha