"
"Is there any asparagus in the garden?" asked Beryl; "because I've told
cook--"
"Not anywhere in the garden," snapped the Rector, "but there's no doubt
plenty in the asparagus-bed, which is the usual place for it."
And he walked away into the region of fruit trees and vegetable beds to
exchange irritation for boredom. It was there, among the gooseberry
bushes and beneath the medlar trees, that the temptation to the
perpetration of a great literary fraud came to him.
Some weeks later the _Bi-Monthly Review_ gave to the world, under the
guarantee of the Rev. Wilfrid Gaspilton, some fragments of Persian verse,
alleged to have been unearthed and translated by a nephew who was at
present campaigning somewhere in the Tigris valley. The Rev. Wilfrid
possessed a host of nephews, and it was of course, quite possible that
one or more of them might be in military employ in Mesopotamia, though no
one could call to mind any particular nephew who could have been
suspected of being a Persian scholar.
The verses were attributed to one Ghurab, a hunter, or, according to
other accounts, warden of the royal fishponds, who lived, in some
unspecified century, in the neighbourhood of Karmanshah.
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