" Wednesday, the fourteenth of June, was Jack Vance's birthday, and just before morning school he expressed his intention of keeping it up in a novel manner.

" I accepted the offer eagerly (not, I fear, from pure enthusiasm for the subject), and she brought forth from the bag four blue-covered, quarto note-books, each dealing with one of the four dynasties from the fourteenth to the seventeenth.

Then followed a tenth edition in 1618, an eleventh in 1622, a twelfth in 1627, a thirteenth in 1628, a fourteenth in 1630, a fifteenth in 1632, a sixteenth in 1638; and then a pause, the seventeenth being in 1664, two years before the fire of London.

I asked a woman who brings us fruit every day, why she had not come on the fourteenth as usual.