(The Sir Richard Phillips concerned was the vegetarian publisher so finely touched off by Borrow in _Lavengro_.) In his youth Sir Richard Phillips edited and published a paper at Leicester, called the _Herald_.

One day an article appeared in it headed 'Dutch Mail,' and added to it was an announcement that it had arrived too late for translation, and so had been cut up and printed in the original.

This wondrous article drove half of England crazy, and for years the best Dutch scholars squabbled and pored over it without being able to arrive at any idea of what it meant.

This famous 'Dutch Mail' was, in reality, merely a column of pie.

The story Sir Richard tells of this particular pie he had a whole hand in is this:-- "One evening, before one of our publications, my men and a boy overturned two or three columns of the paper in type.