[…] an older man, attired in gray, with hair to match, was busily engaged at one end of the room packing a quantity of small cases into a larger one, and continuing to hold converse with himself by means of the monosyllable “yes,” differently intonated, at intervals of half-a-minute, “y-e-s—y-e-s.”

Time was when my old friend, Benno the bottle-o, drew his turn-out into the shade of the big old fig-trees under the church at the top of the hill, and went back and thrashed the most notoriously brutal driver well and good.

We sent in a neotologist and in 2 years he brought that rate down to less than half of what it was before.

Tall, muscular, golden-skinned, he ranted bitterly about the injustice done to him pre-natally.