It was when I began to ascend Notting Hill that I first heard the
hooting. It reminded me at first of a Siren, and then of the top note of
my maiden aunt, in her day a notorious soprano vocalist. She
subsequently emigrated to France, and entered a nunnery under the
religious name of Soeur Marie Jeanne. "Tul-ulla-lulla-liety," wailed the
Voice in a sort of superhuman jodel, coming, as it seemed to me, from
the region of Westminster Bridge.

The persistent ululation began to get upon my nerves. I found, moreover,
that I was again extremely hungry and thirsty. It was already noon. Why
was I wandering alone in this derelict city, clad in my wife's skirt and
my cook's Sunday bonnet?

Grotesque and foolish as it may seem to the scientific reader, I was
entirely unable to answer this simple conundrum. My mind reverted to my
school days. I found myself declining _musa_. Curious to relate, I had
entirely forgotten the genitive of _ego_.... With infinite trouble I
managed to break into a vegetarian restaurant, and made a meal off some
precocious haricot beans, a brace of Welsh rabbits, and ten bottles of
botanic beer.

Working back into Holland Park Avenue and thence keeping steadily along
High Street, Notting Hill Gate, I determined to make my way to the
Marble Arch, in the hopes of finding some fresh materials for my studies
in the Stone Age.

In Bark Place, where the Ladies' Kennel Club had made their vast
grand-stand, were a number of pitiful vestiges of the Waterloo of
women-kind. There was a shattered Elswick bicycle, about sixteen yards