1001 Classic Short Stories & Tales

"The Aunt and the Sluggard" is a short story by P. G. Wodehouse, and features the young gentleman Bertie Wooster and his valet Jeeves. The story was published in the Saturday Evening Post in the United States in April 1916, and in The Strand Magazine in the United Kingdom in August 1916. The story was also included in the 1925 collection Carry On, Jeeves.[1] In the story, Bertie's friend Rocky, a reclusive poet who dislikes city life, needs help from Bertie and Jeeves when he is instructed by his aunt to go to exciting parties in New York and write letters to her about them. Plot He was a poet. At least, he wrote poems when he did anything; but most of his time, as far as I could make out, he spent in a sort of trance. He told me once that he could sit on a fence, watching a worm and wondering what on earth it was up to, for hours at a stretch. — Bertie describes Rocky, the sluggard[2] In New York, Bertie is surprised to be woken by his friend Rockmetteller "Rocky" Todd, who normally lives quietly in the coun