"Mr Featherstone Takes a Ride."

A comic story featuring an amoral and easy-going swindler named Niggler (who bears some resemblance to Pop Larkin) and an innocent hitchhiking philosophy student (with traits in common with Mr. Charlton, again of the Larkin family series).

Bates notes the source of the story in a 1941 incident in which he, like Featherstone, "loaned" five quid to a hitchhiker who "weighed up in about three minutes flat: the easy, dead easy touch...The incident of my Cockney friend and his confidence trick never left my mind, and more than twenty years later I turned it into a story...for which an editor paid me 250 guineas, thus showing a fair profit on a morning in which I too had been taken for one" (The World in Ripeness, pp. 12-13). The story features a favorite Bates character, a pipe-smoking and masculine-dressing lesbian (with her partner).

In Woman's Journal (October 1961), The Golden Oriole (1962).