This would give eight trees at each street intersection, which would finally grow into groups, over-arching and emphasizing these intersections, the blocks between these groups to be planted with smaller and more ornamental trees and forming, as it were, a section of a parkway.

By classifying van Niekerk's food on a par with scrag ends of cheese and half-tins of sardines, we managed to eat a surprising number of omelets of a surprising number of varieties: caviare omelet, grouse omelet, roll-mop omelet, almost anything that could be chopped up and served between folds of egg was added to the list .

'Twas early June, the new grass was flourishing everywheres, the posies in the yard—peonies and such—in full bloom, the Sun was shining, and the water of the bay was blue, with light green streaks where the shoal showed.

There is, I suggest, a typically Achillean joke at play here, a visual pun, displaying the phoenix as truly phoenix-ian in its exposure of its sex organs and at the same time snidely alluding to the Phoenicians' famed preoccupation with female genitalia.