300 WORST JOURNEY IN THE WORLD 
CHIEF CUSTODIAN. It is not necessary: it is all right. 
You needn’t wait. 
HEROIC EXPLORER. I should like to have a receipt. 
But by this time the Chief Custodian’s attention is 
again devoted wholly to the Person of Importance. Feel- 
ing that to persist in overhearing their conversation would 
be an indelicacy, the Heroic Explorer politely leaves the 
room, and establishes himself on a chair in a gloomy pass- 
age outside, where he wiles away the time by rehearsing 
in his imagination how he will tell off the Chief Custodian 
when the Person of Importance retires. But this the 
Person of Importance shows no sign of doing, and the 
Explorer’s thoughts and intentions become darker and 
darker. As the day wears on, minor officials, passing to 
and from the Presence, look at him doubtfully and ask his 
business. The reply is always the same, “I am waiting 
for a receipt for some penguins’ eggs.’”’ At last it be- 
comes clear from the Explorer’s expression that what he is 
really waiting for is not to take a receipt but to commit 
murder. Presumably this is reported to the destined 
victim: at all events the receipt finally comes; and the 
Explorer goes his way with it, feeling that he has behaved 
like a perfect gentleman, but so very dissatisfied with that 
vapid consolation that for hours he continues his imagin- 
ary rehearsals of what he would have liked to have done to 
that Custodian (mostly with his boots) by way of teaching 
him manners. 
Some time after this I visited the Natural History 
Museum with Captain Scott’s:sister. After a slight pre- 
liminary skirmish in which we convinced a minor custo- 
dian that the specimens brought by the expedition from 
the Antarctic did not include the moths we found preying 
on some of them, Miss Scott expressed a wish to see the 
penguins’ eggs. Thereupon the minor custodians flatly 
denied that any such eggs were in existence or in their 
possession. Now Miss Scott was her brother’s sister ; 
and she showed so little disposition to take this lying down 
that I was glad to get her away with no worse consequences 
than a profanely emphasized threat on my part that if we 
