to gag on. A throttle to throttle you with. Come on, boy, he said to himself. No horse named Morbid ever won a race.
Besides, he thought, as he looked in the windows of the various shops he passed, the charcuterie with the Parmesan cheeses and the hams from San Daniele, and the sausages alla cacciatora, and the bottles of good Scotch whisky and real Gordon’s gin, the cutlery store, an antique dealer’s with some good pieces and some old maps and prints, a second-rate restaurant disguised expensively as one of the first class, and then came to the first bridge crossing a feeder canal with steps to be climbed, I don’t feel so badly. There is only the buzzing. I remember when that started and I thought perhaps it was seven year locusts in the trees and I did not like to ask young Lowry but I did. And he answered, No, General, I don’t hear any crickets or seven year locusts. The night is perfectly quiet except for the usual noises.
Then, as he climbed, he felt the twinges, and coming down the other side, he saw two lovely looking girls. They were beautiful and hatless and poorly but chicly dressed, and they were talking very fast to each other and the wind was blowing their hair as they climbed with their long, easy striding Venetian legs and the Colonel said to himself, I’d better quit window gazing along this street and make that next bridge, and two squares afterwards you turn due right and keep along it till you are in Harry’s.
He did just that, twinging on the bridge, but walking with his same old stride and only seeing, quickly, the people
