PENGUIN BOOKS
Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ
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and Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England
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Viking Penguin Inc., 40 West 23rd Street, New York, New York 10010, USA
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Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand
First published by Herbert Jenkins 1927
Published in Penguin Books 1962
Reprinted 1967, 1975, 1981, 1984, 1985, 1988
Copyright 1927 by P. G. Wodehouse
All rights reserved
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading
Set in Monotype Garamond
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject tothe condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher'sprior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that inwhich it is published and without a similar condition including thiscondition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
TO THE
EARL OF OXFORD AND
ASQUITH
Two men were sitting in the bar-parlour of the Anglers' Rest as Ientered it; and one of them, I gathered from his low, excited voice andwide gestures, was telling the other a story. I could hear nothing butan occasional 'Biggest I ever saw in my life!' and 'Fully as large asthat!' but in such a place it was not difficult to imagine the rest;and when the second man, catching my eye, winked at me with a sort ofhumorous misery, I smiled sympathetically back at him.
The action had the effect of establishing a bond between us; and whenthe story-teller finished his tale and left, he came over to my tableas if answering a formal invitation.
'Dreadful liars some men are,' he said genially.
'Fishermen,' I suggested, 'are traditionally careless of the truth.'
'He wasn't a fisherman,' said my companion. 'That was our local doctor.He was telling me about his latest case of dropsy. Besides'—he tappedme earnestly on the knee—'you must not fall into the popular errorabout fishermen. Tradition has maligned them. I am a fisherman myself,and I have never told a lie in my life.'
I could well believe it. He was a short, stout, comfo