Publisher's Synopsis
This is a fairly miscellaneous collection. Most of the stories concern relationships, sports, household pets and do not feature any of Wodehouse's regular characters; one, however, Extricating Young Gussie, is notable for the first appearance in print of Wodehouse's best-known characters: Jeeves, Bertie Wooster and Bertie's fearsome Aunt Agatha.
Students of the folklore of the United States of America are no doubt familiar with the quaint old story of Clarence MacFadden. Clarence MacFadden, it seems, was "wishful to dance, but his feet wasn't gaited that way. So he sought a professor and asked him his price, and said he was willing to pay. The professor" (the legend goes on) "looked down with alarm at his feet and marked their enormous expanse; and he tacked on a five to his regular price for teaching MacFadden to dance." I have often been struck by the close similarity between the case of Clarence and that of Henry Wallace Mills. One difference alone presents itself. It would seem to have been mere vanity and ambition that stimulated the former; whereas the motive force which drove Henry Mills to defy Nature and attempt dancing was the purer one of love. He did it to please his wife. Had he never gone to Ye Bonnie Briar-Bush Farm, that popular holiday resort and there met Minnie Hill, he would doubtless have continued to spend in peaceful reading the hours not given over to work at the New York bank at which he was employed as paying-cashier. For Henry was a voracious reader.
