JEEVES AND THE CHUMP CYRIL


You know, the longer I live, the more clearly I see that half the
trouble in this bally world is caused by the light-hearted and
thoughtless way in which chappies dash off letters of introduction and
hand them to other chappies to deliver to chappies of the third part.
It's one of those things that make you wish you were living in the
Stone Age. What I mean to say is, if a fellow in those days wanted to
give anyone a letter of introduction, he had to spend a month or so
carving it on a large-sized boulder, and the chances were that the
other chappie got so sick of lugging the thing round in the hot sun
that he dropped it after the first mile. But nowadays it's so easy to
write letters of introduction that everybody does it without a second
thought, with the result that some perfectly harmless cove like myself
gets in the soup.

Mark you, all the above is what you might call the result of my riper
experience. I don't mind admitting that in the first flush of the
thing, so to speak, when Jeeves told me--this would be about three
weeks after I'd landed in America--that a blighter called Cyril
Bassington-Bassington had arrived and I found that he had brought a
letter of introduction to me from Aunt Agatha ... where was I? Oh,
yes ... I don't mind admitting, I was saying, that just at first I was
rather bucked. You see, after the painful events which had resulted in
my leaving England I hadn't expected to get any sort of letter from
Aunt Agatha which would pass the censor, so to speak. And it was a