September-October 2006 > Montage

Chapter and Verse

Chapter & Verse

Correspondence on not-so-famous lost words

Wayles Brown seeks to locate a story about a boy of English and Hindu parentage who encounters the word “Eurasian” and asks his teachers what it means. They say evasively that he will understand when he is older, but he should never forget that Jesus loves him.

Joe Walsh hopes that someone can identify the poem in which a gentian is described as being “a deep and hurtful blue.” D.H. Lawrence may be the poet, he notes, “but neither ‘Bavarian Gentians’ nor anything else I can find contains that phrase.”

“British whodunit [and] Bradshaw” (July-August). Bettina Arnold was the first of several readers to suggest The Five Red Herrings, by Dorothy Sayers; although Bradshaw is not specifically mentioned, Nicholas Puner confirms that novel as the one he was seeking. He thanks Ruth Mandalian and those who suggested Agatha Christie’s The ABC Murders, Mike Halpern and others who suggested Sir John Magill’s Last Journey and additional works by Freeman Wills Croft, and James Durham, who suggested The Riddle of the Sands, by Erskine Childers.

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