Forthwith he created M.L.  Sigden, a recluse of refined tastes who in The Bun demanded to know whether this Huckley-of-the-Hoopoe was the Hugly of his boyhood and whether, by any chance, the fell change of name had been wrought by collusion between a local magnate and the railway, in the mistaken interests of spurious refinement.  ’For I knew it and loved it with the maidens of my day—­eheu ab angulo!—­as Hugly,’ wrote M.L.  Sigden from Oxf.

Though other papers scoffed, The Bun was gravely sympathetic.  Several people wrote to deny that Huckley had been changed at birth.  Only the Rector—­no philosopher as he pointed out, but a lover of accuracy—­had his doubts, which he laid publicly before Mr. M.L.  Sigden who suggested, through The Bun, that the little place might have begun life in Anglo-Saxon days as ‘Hogslea’ or among the Normans as ‘Argile,’ on account of its much clay.  The Rector had his own ideas too (he said it was mostly gravel), and M.L.  Sigden had a fund of reminiscences.  Oddly enough—­which is seldom the case with free reading-matter—­our subscribers rather relished the correspondence, and contemporaries quoted freely.

‘The secret of power,’ said Ollyett, ’is not the big stick.  It’s the liftable stick.’ (This means the ‘arresting’ quotation of six or seven lines.) ’Did you see the Spec. had a middle on “Rural Tenacities” last week.  That was all Huckley.  I’m doing a “Mobiquity” on Huckley next week.’

Our ‘Mobiquities’ were Friday evening accounts of easy motor-bike-cum-side-car trips round London, illustrated (we could never get that machine to work properly) by smudgy maps.  Ollyett wrote the stuff with a fervour and a delicacy which I always ascribed to the side-car.  His account of Epping Forest, for instance, was simply young love with its soul at its lips.  But his Huckley ‘Mobiquity’ would have sickened a soap-boiler.  It chemically combined loathsome familiarity, leering suggestion, slimy piety and rancid ‘social service’ in one fuming compost that fairly lifted me off my feet.

‘Yes,’ said he, after compliments.  ’It’s the most vital, arresting and dynamic bit of tump I’ve done up to date. Non nobis gloria! I met Sir Thomas Ingell in his own park.  He talked to me again.  He inspired most of it.’

’Which?  The “glutinous native drawl,” or “the neglected adenoids of the village children"?’ I demanded.

’Oh, no!  That’s only to bring in the panel doctor.  It’s the last flight we—­I’m proudest of.’

This dealt with ’the crepuscular penumbra spreading her dim limbs over the boskage’; with ‘jolly rabbits’; with a herd of ’gravid polled Angus’; and with the ’arresting, gipsy-like face of their swart, scholarly owner—­as well known at the Royal Agricultural Shows as that of our late King-Emperor.’

‘"Swart” is good and so’s “gravid,"’ said I, ’but the panel doctor will be annoyed about the adenoids.’