to get someone else to chaperone the school fair. Barmy and Pongo decide that a girl who would inflict school fairs or troublemaking mothers on someone is not worth bothering about anyway. They clasp hands, their friendship restored. "Trouble Down at Tudsleigh" UK: Strand, May 1935 US: Cosmopolitan, May 1939 Wodehouse's earlier story The Girl on the Boat (1922) features a character named Sam Marlowe who studies Tennyson's works to impress a girl. Wodehouse reused this plot point in "Trouble Down at Tudsleigh", in which Freddie Widgeon reads Tennyson's works to impress April. Plot At the Drones Club, a Crumpet tries to sell a book of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poems, but nobody is interested. The book belongs to Freddie Widgeon, whom the Crumpet is trying to sell the book for. The other Drones are shocked that Freddie would buy such a book. Saying that Freddie bought it to impress a girl, the Crumpet narrates the following story. Freddie goes to a town called Tudsleigh in Worcestershire to fish. He falls in love with April Carroway, the daughter of a family friend residing at Tudsleigh Court. April reads a book titled Collected Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson to her kid sister Prudence. Freddie acquires a copy. He meets Captain Bradbury, an intimidating man of the British Indian Army and a jealous rival for April's love. Freddie reads Tennyson's "Lady of Shalott", and impresses April by discussing the poet with her. She agrees to go rowing and then picnic with him. Bradbury threatens Freddie, but Freddie is undeterred. Waiting in the boat the next day, Freddie sees Prudence, who tells him that April cannot come. April wants Freddie to take Prudence instead, and April will try to come later. Freddie and Prudence set off. Prudence feels that Tennyson's heroines are soppy, but Freddie disagrees and says she would do well to behave like any one of them. After lunch, Prudence mentions that she was expelled from school for playing William Tell and trying to shoot an apple off the head of a pig, and she had also set her dormitory on fire playing Florence Nightingale ("The Lady with the Lamp"). Freddie takes a nap, then finds Prudence gone. He thinks he sees her in the river so he swims in, but it is only her frock. Looking for dry clothes, Freddie enters a nearby unoccupied house. He is changing when he sees