Wyatt went off to the Argentine, bagged a gaucho

We interrupt our investiga-

tion of scowls in deference

to Friday's natural prefer-

ence for the happiest news.

James Wyatt, our leader of

school from Mike at Wrykyn,

had been sent down by his

own hopeless step-father,

into a clerkship in the

dankest bank in the City;

Wodehousians will know, 

he shared this fate, also,

or possibly we'd have had

to read terribly good trans-

lations of Classical histor-

ies, his métier, instead of

the restive inventions of

timeless, not to say incur-

able, youth. With all of

Wrykyn, Mike was sorry, and

then a lamp flickered in a

nascent socket of his soul,

and he remembered that his

father owned enormous swaths

of Argentina. Couldn't Wyatt,

a very noble shot for Wrykyn

and also of cats by air-gun 

in the garden by moonlight, 

justify a turn on the pampas?

What a happy Friday it was,

at Mike's breakfast table as

the post arrived from Buenos

Aires, relating how Wyatt had

subdued a gaucho poacher with

a nifty shot to his ankle, af-

ter taking one for the family

firm, in the shoulder. As with

his air-gun and the cats, no-

body seemed to have been hurt

very much, and naturally a fel-

low needs to expect a few in-

dignities sometime, as an as-

pect of leading the school.

Dashed inconvenient, though,

if the gaucho's nicks should

have kept him from the Somme,

as his age now would keep him

from Fallujah. Bad enough, to

have missed Belfast, if it came

to that. This was 1909; and for

our eternally oblivious scribe,

it stayed that way. One hasn't 

the heart to regret it. There's

plenty else, not to mention our

news this week, to jolt the sur-

est taste for agony; but there

is only the rarest invective, to

match his abundant innocence.

P.G. Wodehouse

Mike at Wrykyn

op. cit.

iv  Mathias Lauridsen