"The Bird of the Difficult Eye" by Lord Dunsany

Some references to the original "Book of Wonder"! Gotta love it. You can find the story "Distressing Tale of Thangobrind the Jeweller" here on my channel, along with the rest of "The Book of Wonder". If you enjoy these stories from "The Last Book of Wonder", definitely go check out that playlist as well! Lord Castlenorman also appears in some stories from that first book.

Bond Street - a real street in the West End of London home to very prestigious and upscale fashion retailers, including a number of jewelers like Tiffany's and Asprey.

Grosvenor: A real noble family (dating all the way back to the time of William the Conqueror), and one of the richest families in Britain, owning a surprisingly large amount of the property in London.

And yet, in this story, we are told that the Grosvenor family is NOT English? *boggle* Yes, it is originally Norman French, but they came over to England in 1066, so you can't get much more English than that. And Campbell? I mean ok, Campbell is Scottish, not English, but how would they not speak English? As a big time businessman in London, surely English would be a language they could speak quite well, even if not to perfect native level of fluency. What a very strange thing to suggest neither of these people speak English.

Guinea: in 1916, the year this book was published, a guinea would be worth 21 shillings. Depending on how you care to calculate it, 1 guinea in 1916 would be worth on the order of £75 to £700 today. Even at £75, for a bottle a wine that's going to be a pretty good wine.

A crown would be 5 shillings, so a half-crown would be 2/6. So that half-crown is going to be in the range of £9 to £80 today. Which, rather curiously, is still in the ballpark of prices today for Cuban cigars!

£100,000 in 1916 is a whopping enormous sum, rating in today in the range of £7 million to £67 million!

The picture used is an illustration for the story by Sidney Sime

To follow along: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/13821/13821-h/13821-h.htm#bird