Excerpt: "The Bells of St. Michaels"

    As the clipper ship moved past Sullivan’s Island, the British mice skittered down the ropes and hid in brown paper in a box packed with a shipment of crystal. At the dock, as sailors were overhead securing the rigging, Reginald, Jeeves and the four other mice scurried down a halyard and onto the pier where a gray Charleston mouse bid them welcome.

   “Uncle Reginald! So wonderful you could come for Yule! Did you have a pleasant voyage?”

   “As pleasant as may be expected. You must be my nephew Archibald. And how is your mother, my dear sister?”

   “Fine as a mouse in a cheese factory,” replied Archibald. “She is is quite anxious to see you.”

   “Quite, I’m sure,” said Jeeves. “And speaking of cheese, we could do with some tea. We haven’t eaten properly in days. Where is the flat?”

   “Not far. Just up Adger’s Wharf,” said Archibald. “But I’m afraid we shall have to scurry. I know in London mice are wont to hitch a ride on a hansom or a coach and four. But here we make do with scurrying. Does keep the pounds off you know, Uncle Jeeves.”

    Archibald didn’t mean anything by this. But any bystander familiar with the normal girth of a mouse would have assumed it was a suggestion Uncle Jeeves get more exercise. 

   “Positively provincial,” he muttered. “But I suppose here in the colonies...”

   The mice set off down the wharf, avoiding wagons and carriages, sailors and merchants and, at the end of the pier, a large orange tiger cat. They found their way to a brick building with a black sign and gold letters:

                                              Archibald, Pinckney and Ravenel

                                                  Forwarders and Exchangers

   “Not at all a proper occupation, if an occupation it be,” Jeeves muttered. “No one of standing in Devonshire would ever admit being in such a line of work. But, I suppose, everyone here in the colonies works in the trades.”

   Archibald led the party beside the building and into a small Charleston garden with paths of old brick lined with beds ivy and boxwood.

   “Now this is more like the Old Country,” proclaimed Jeeves. “Civilization has arrived in the colonies after all.”

   In a corner of the garden a drainpipe climbed the side of a brick single house.

   “Right this way. It’s only three stories,” Archibald said.

   “What? A drainpipe?” exclaimed Jeeves. “You can’t be serious. How positively uncouth. Imagine going back and forth to one’s flat through a drainpipe…”