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Here are the quotations for the coming week (June 15th to 21st)

1. They seated themselves in the heavy chairs on the pebbled floor beneath the eaves of the summer house by the orchard. A table between them carried wine and glasses, and a packet of papers, with pen and ink. The larger man of the two, his doublet unbuttoned, his broad face blotched and scarred, puffed a little as he came to rest. The other picked up an apple from the grass, bit it, and went on with the thread of the talk that they must have carried out of doors with them. 

2. Her cinnabar-tinted topsail, nicking the hot blue horizon, showed she was a Spanish wheat-boat hours before she reached Marseilles mole. There, the mainsail brailed itself, a spritsail broke out forward, and a handy driver aft; and she threaded her way through the shipping to her berth at the quay as quietly as a veiled woman slips through a bazaar. 

3. John drew from his bosom a stamped leather box. Some six or eight inches long, wherein, bedded on faded velvet, lay what looked like silver-bound compasses of old box-wood, with a screw at the top which opened or closed the legs to minute fractions. The legs terminated, not in points, but spoon-shapedly, one spatula pierced with a metal-lined hole less than a quarter of an inch across, the other with a half-inch hole. Into this latter, John, after carefully wiping with a silk rag, slipped a metal cylinder that carried glass or crystal, it seemed, at each end... 

The sources of this week's extracts (June 8th to 14th) are as follows:

1.  (...she took spices, and milk, and onion, with little fish from the brooks - anon limes for sherbets, fat quails from the pits...)  This is from Kim. 

2.  (...‘Suprème of chicken,’ he read loudly, ‘Filet béarnaise, Woodcock and Richebourg ’74, pêches Melba, Croutes Baron....')  This is from "Sea Constables" in Debits and Credits. 

3.  (...… they ate wild sheep roasted on the hot stones, and flavoured with wild garlic and wild pepper; and wild duck stuffed with wild rice and wild fenugreek...)  This is from "The Cat that Walked by Himself" in Just So Stories. 

In the New Readers' Guide we have just published an updated version  of Brian Mattinson's catalogue of the The Musical Settings of Kipling's Verse. , and notes by John McGivering on "The Edge of the Evening" from A Diversity of Creatures.

Good wishes to all,  John R