'Then, sometimes, if there was a holiday, Mr Windrell, very romantically but elegantly dressed under his old overcoat, would journey up to London for a meeting of the Brethren (they all bore names in the "Circle," such as Brother Aloysius or Brother Merlin). It always seemed somewhat incongruous that, instead of travelling up to this gathering of fellow-warlocks by broomstick at midnight, or on the tail of a shooting star, he should thus be conveyed to it in full daylight by such very matter-of-fact methods of locomotion as trains and tubes: a blasted heath, one felt too, or some horrid glade in a tangled forest, would have been a more suitable setting for it than a stuffy, mid-Victorian sitting-room in a lodging-house near Paddington Station...'
from Happy Endings, a piece in Dumb-Animal by Osbert Sitwell
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