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ANTHONY IN BLUE ALSATIA*
By Eleanor Farjeon
Eleanor Faijeon wrote delightful and distinctive poems for children. Her first novel was "Ladybrook", a tale of Sussex country life which retained that delicate humorous touch which characterized the work she did for children. Her sensitive¬ness to beauty and true understanding of *he essential qualities of romance find expression in this charming rhapsody.
Skipping his breakfast paper one day, bewildered, as he always was, by vital facts about Home Rails, Questions in the House, and Three-Piece Suits: facts grasped, as he knew, instantaneously in their full import all over England by different orders of mind from his, through which they slipped as through gauze, Anthony's roving eye was captured by certain words in a paragraph headed
Mouchard (near the Jura Mountains)
Jura Mountains... Blue smoke... a blue-eyed Alsatian... a Concer¬tina... the Blue Alsatian Express., many miles from nowhere... hay¬making damsels in white sunbonnets... hayrakes... laughing at us...
A Minor Mystery
Anthony's eye roved no more. He felt that the gauze, which could not contain the torrents of the world's activities, might house this butterfly and not brush off its bloom. He read the paragraph with attention. It described the breakdown "many miles from nowhere" of the Blue Alsatian Express at the foot of the Jura Mountains. It described the blue smoke rising from a heated axle, the engine-driver sprinting along the lines like a madman, soldiers jumping out on the line a:.d playing a concertina, a nervous woman-passenger wonder¬ing what had happened; it indicated the plutocratic luxury of the corridor train with its restaurant; it told of the blue mountains and the blue sky, and "the hay-making damsels in white sunbonnets and

hayforks on their shoulders" who "are laughing at us over the hedg¬erows".
And then came the paragraph headed "A Minor Mystery" which ended the account of the accident.
"One mystery about this train will never be solved. When it first came to a standstill a quiet little man, who looked like a country farm¬er, packed up his things, climbed out of the train, and deliberately walked away from it without any outward sign of annoyance, hesita¬tion, or distraction, crossing the fields and disappearing into a wood.
Had the breakdown occurred within easy reach of his own home or destination?"
"Oh, no," said Anthony, answering the journalist, "of course not!"
Why should it? It was most unlikely. And — annoyance? Why should the little man be annoyed? And where was the Mystery, Mi¬nor or Major?
Railways — it is their drawback — compel you to travel to some¬where. You, who desire to travel to Anywhere, must take your ticket to Stroud or Stoke, and chance it. The safest plan is to choose some place with a name like Lulworth, Downderry, or Nether Wallop; such places surely cannot go far wrong. But even though they prove to be heaven in its first, second, or third degree, still, there you must go, and nowhere else; — and think of the Seventh Heavens you flash through continually oh your way there, Heavens with no names and no stations, Heavens to which no tickets are issued. To whom has it not happened, time and again, on his way to the Seaside, the Moors, or the Highlands, to cry in his heart, at some glimpse of Paradise from the carriage windows: " That is where I really wanted to go — that is where I would like to get out! That valley of flowers, that cottage in the birch-glade, that buttercup field with the little river and a king¬fisher — if only the train would stop!" — But it never does.
Never? Once it did. Anthony laughed aloud at that Minor Mis-tery in his morning paper. Where was the Mystery? Luck had been with the quiet little man, and he did the only thing there was to do.
..."Why have we stopped?" asked the nervous lady who sat op-posite Anthony in the stuffy carriage.
"Ha-ha-ha! Ha-ha-ha!" laughed a fresh young voice outside.
"Preposterous, preposterous! I shall be late!" snorted a fat millionaire.
"I want my lunch," puffed his fat wife. "I refuse to go without my lunch!"