A colleague of my cousin’s who had recently been in London told him that during his stay in London he was suddenly seized—between ten and eleven o’clock at night in Piccadilly Circus—with the idea of boarding an Underground train, no matter what line, and traveling to the end of the line as he had often done before, because for as long as he could remember there was nothing in the world about which he was so enthusiastic as the London Underground, which could not be compared with any other underground railway in the whole world and certainly not with the Paris Métro, which had so disappointed him the first time he had traveled on it that he had decided never to set foot in the city of Paris again. My cousin’s colleague would scarcely arrive in London before he would take some Underground train or other and travel on it for as long as he could, and, in fact, he had traveled so often on all the Underground lines in London that he had lost count of how often. In fact, on the day in question he had traveled on the Underground several times, but even by ten in the evening he had still not had enough of it. But then, as the Underground enthusiast said to my cousin, when the Underground train entered the station and the automatic doors opened, the passengers who were jammed up against the door fell out of the train totally rigid and dead, and the others remained, equally rigid and dead, standing or sitting in the train. Shocked as he was—he was the only person waiting on the platform—he ran back up to Piccadilly Circus. He claims, however, that when he told the Underground officials of his experience, they merely shook their heads. He then went to Knightsbridge to recover. Since that time, he says, he has never traveled on the Underground.

Increased

INCREASED

A woman with forty-eight previous convictions, described by the presiding judge of the district court in Wels, right at the opening of her by then most recent trial—the Wels paper reports—as a thieving old woman well known to the court, was on this occasion accused of stealing a pair of, for her, completely useless opera glasses from a recently deceased female opera-goer who had, however, been completely unable to walk for many years and was no longer able to go to the opera, for which reasons she had long not used the opera glasses and had in fact forgotten that she had them—all of which came out in the course of the proceedings. The woman was able to increase her original sentence, which was only three months’ imprisonment, by six months by means of boxing the judge’s ears as soon as sentence was passed. She said she had hoped to get at least nine months in prison because she could not stand being free any longer.