For Vajpayee, who is keen that he alone does not carry the can for his unwieldy alliance, it is a tough decision.

He would sometimes downplay his Princeton education by saying simply that he went to school in New Jersey.

Publicly, in a letter to local authorities, Pepco President William Sim blamed at least some of the company's woes on its new automated answering system and said his company had identified and corrected the cause of the customer misnotification.

The partridge drums upon the hill, a daddock old and battered, While, now and then, an oriole lights up a scarlet gleam.