with that dusty but attractive class of people who go about on the
high-roads drunk but enfamille (so redeeming the minor lapse), in the
summertime, with a perambulator, lavender to sell, sun-brown children,
a smell, and ambiguous bundles that fire the imagination. Navvies,
farm-labourers, sailormen and stokers, all such as sit in 1834
beer-houses, are beyond me also, and I suppose must remain so now for
ever. My intercourse with the ducal rank too has been negligible; I
once went shooting with a duke, and in an outburst of what was no doubt
snobbishness, did my best to get him in the legs. But that failed.

I'm sorry I haven't done the whole lot though....

You will ask by what merit I achieved this remarkable social range,
this extensive cross-section of the British social organism. It was the
Accident of Birth. It always is in England.

Indeed, if I may make the remark so cosmic, everything is. But that is
by the way. I was my uncle's nephew, and my uncle was no less a person
than Edward Ponderevo, whose comet-like transit of the financial
heavens happened--it is now ten years ago! Do you remember the days
of Ponderevo, the great days, I mean, of Ponderevo? Perhaps you had
a trifle in some world-shaking enterprise! Then you know him only
too well. Astraddle on Tono-Bungay, he flashed athwart the empty
heavens--like a comet--rather, like a stupendous rocket!--and overawed
investors spoke of his star. At his zenith he burst into a cloud of
the most magnificent promotions. What a time that was! The Napoleon of
domestic conveniences!

I was his nephew, his peculiar and intimate nephew. I was hanging on
to his coat-tails all the way through. I made pills with him in the