“My aunt, who owns the greater part of Lincolnshire,” broke in Treddleford, with dramatic abruptness, “possesses perhaps the most remarkable record in the way of a pheasant bag that has ever been achieved.  She is seventy-five and can’t hit a thing, but she always goes out with the guns.  When I say she can’t hit a thing, I don’t mean to say that she doesn’t occasionally endanger the lives of her fellow-guns, because that wouldn’t be true.  In fact, the chief Government Whip won’t allow Ministerial M.P.’s to go out with her; ’We don’t want to incur by-elections needlessly,’ he quite reasonably observed.  Well, the other day she winged a pheasant, and brought it to earth with a feather or two knocked out of it; it was a runner, and my aunt saw herself in danger of being done out of about the only bird she’d hit during the present reign.  Of course she wasn’t going to stand that; she followed it through bracken and brushwood, and when it took to the open country and started across a ploughed field she jumped on to the shooting pony and went after it.  The chase was a long one, and when my aunt at last ran the bird to a standstill she was nearer home than she was to the shooting party; she had left that some five miles behind her.”

“Rather a long run for a wounded pheasant,” snapped Amblecope.

“The story rests on my aunt’s authority,” said Treddleford coldly, “and she is local vice-president of the Young Women’s Christian Association.  She trotted three miles or so to her home, and it was not till the middle of the afternoon that it was discovered that the lunch for the entire shooting party was in a pannier attached to the pony’s saddle.  Anyway, she got her bird.”

“Some birds, of course, take a lot of killing,” said Amblecope; “so do some fish.  I remember once I was fishing in the Exe, lovely trout stream, lots of fish, though they don’t run to any great size—­”

“One of them did,” announced Treddleford, with emphasis.  “My uncle, the Bishop of Southmolton, came across a giant trout in a pool just off the main stream of the Exe near Ugworthy; he tried it with every kind of fly and worm every day for three weeks without an atom of success, and then Fate intervened on his behalf.  There was a low stone bridge just over this pool, and on the last day of his fishing holiday a motor van ran violently into the parapet and turned completely over; no one was hurt, but part of the parapet was knocked away, and the entire load that the van was carrying was pitched over and fell a little way into the pool.  In a couple of minutes the giant trout was flapping and twisting on bare mud at the bottom of a waterless pool, and my uncle was able to walk down to him and fold him to his breast.  The van-load consisted of blotting-paper, and every drop of water in that pool had been sucked up into the mass of spilt cargo.”

There was silence for nearly half a minute in the smoking-room, and Treddleford began to let his mind steal back towards the golden road that led to Samarkand.  Amblecope, however, rallied, and remarked in a rather tired and dispirited voice: