Comments and Stories 53 



Redgrave, I reckon I would, but I can't go to sleep with a light 

 burning. I lit a candle a little while ago to read by a while before 

 I went to sleep, and now I can't blow the dam thing out. The 

 flame's froze.'" 



In the awed silence that fell upon the camp William took 

 the floor with a recollection of another military big gun and game 

 hunter who was entertained as a special guest at a country house 

 in the Scots Highlands. Among those bidden to meet this colonel 

 at dinner, was a near-by laird, a dourly doubtful and cannily 

 speaking old gentleman. At dinner, the colonel, being asked for 

 a recital of his greatest exploit, enlarged at length, with much 

 circumstantiality of detail, upon the chase and final slaughter 

 of a man-eating tiger of uncommon ferocity and appetite that 

 for long had been the scourge of a dozen native villages in upper 

 India. With breathless interest the listeners followed the colonel 

 to the death, and with awed respect received the incidental detail 

 of the tiger's size, twenty-six feet from nose to tail tip. 



The laird was moved thereby to a recital of the capture of 

 a great skate that for years had been known to be upon the sea 

 bottom in the vicinity of his home. So vast was the fish that a 

 careless cartographer making a survey of the coast, noting its 

 lightness in the depths, had charted it as a sandbank, and a 

 fishing boat or so seeking anchorage, their anchors having caught 

 in its mouth and tormenting it, had been badly broken up by 

 the monster's consequent struggle to free itself, which be it said, 

 had given it no special effort. With Scots particularity, the 

 laird went into the details of the construction of a wrecking- 

 scow, the provision of derricks and winches of a dockyard type, 

 and the devising and forging of grabhooks of an unique pattern 

 for the ultimate capture of the deep-sea monster. From one 

 incident to another, each more grotesquely improbably probable, 

 the laird proceeded to its final landing and its size and weight, 

 some odd forty feet broad by a hundred long, and seventy tons 

 or so. The colonel chose to take the recital as a satirical re- 

 flection on his own exploit and protested strongly to his host 

 at the insult that, as he said, had been offered him in the house 

 where he was a guest. He demanded immediate amends as the 

 alternative to his departure. His host went to the laird, and 

 made representation of the state of the case, and asked that he 



