ON THE WINGS OF THE WIND. 



Of course, you know my friend the squirting cucumber. 

 If you don't, tbat can be only because you've never 

 looked in the riglit place to find bim. On all waste 

 ground outside most southern cities — Nice, Cannes, 

 Florence: Eome, Algiers, Granada: Athens, Palermo, 

 Tunis, where you will — the soil is thickly covered by 

 dark trailing vines which bear on their branches a queer 

 hairy green fruit, much like a common cucumber at that 

 early stage of its existence when we know it best in the 

 commercial form of pickled gherkins. As long as you 

 don't interfere with them, these hairy green fruits do 

 nothing out of the common in the way of personal 

 aggressiveness. Like the model young lady of the 

 books on etiquette, they don't speak unless they're 

 spoken to. But if peradventure you chance to brush up 

 against the plant accidentally, or you irritate it of set 

 purpose with your foot or your cane, then, as Mr. Eider 

 Haggard would say, 'a strange thing happens': ofij 

 jumps the little green fruit with a startling bounce, and 

 scatters its juice and pulp and seeds explosively through 

 a hole in the end where the stem joined on to it. The 



