PROFESSOR’S PREDICAMENT

Greymouth Evening Star, 17 May 1934, Page 8

PROFESSOR’S PREDICAMENT

SITTING ON ANTS’ NEST. Probably the last article which the late Mr. Arthur Weigall, the famous Egyptologist, wrote was one in which, for “John o’ London’s Weekly,” he recounted humorous incidents connected with explorations in Egypt and explorers. One story is highly amusing. A professor was lecturing in Sweden. While waiting for a train to take him from a small university town to the capital, he sat on a grassy mound behind the station; and when he at last boarded the train he found that his trousers' were covered by very active

and excited ants. It was evident that he had been sitting on one of their nests. Alone in the compartment, he hastily took off his trousers and shook them out of the window. As he did so another train sped in the opposite direction, and away flew the trousers, hooked to the door-handle of a passing carriage. The proprietor’s

plight was terrible'. From the waist up he was a perfectly proper professor; from that point downwards he was a comedian out of an improper French farce. At the next station an elderly lady stepped into the compartment, and plunged back on to the platform with a. scream. Presently a railway official arrived and locked him in. 'Pho man then telegraphed along tho line, for at the next stop there entered the compartment a doctor and two policemen, carrying a rug in which they wrapped the professor, . thereafter obliging him to accompany them to the police station. He could not speak a word of Swedish, and when ho had frenziedly acted in pantomime all that had happened to him, making appropriate grunts and exclamations to illustrate the successive phases of his misadventure, giving spectacular imitations of distracted ants biting him in their terror and of trousers sailing through the air, the doctor became very' grave, and at. once had him taken to the local asylum. It was not until the next morning that he obtained his release.