BEASTS AND SUPER-BEASTS - H. H. MUNRO ("SAKI")


CONTENTS

THE SHE-WOLF
LAURA
THE BOAR-PIG
THE BROGUE
THE HEN
THE OPEN WINDOW
THE TREASURE-SHIP
THE COBWEB
THE LULL
THE UNKINDEST BLOW
THE ROMANCERS
THE SCHARTZ-METTERKLUME METHOD
THE SEVENTH PULLET
THE BLIND SPOT
DUSK
A TOUCH OF REALISM
COUSIN TERESA
THE YARKAND MANNER
THE BYZANTINE OMELETTE
THE FEAST OF NEMESIS
THE DREAMER
THE QUINCE TREE
THE FORBIDDEN BUZZARDS
THE STAKE
CLOVIS ON PARENTAL RESPONSIBILITIES
A HOLIDAY TASK
THE STALLED OX
THE STORY-TELLER
A DEFENSIVE DIAMOND
THE ELK
"DOWN PENS"
THE NAME-DAY
THE LUMBER ROOM
FUR
THE PHILANTHROPIST AND THE HAPPY CAT
ON APPROVAL





Beasts and Super-Beasts




THE SHE-WOLF


LEONARD BILSITER was one of those people who have 
failed to find this world attractive or interesting, and 
who have sought compensation in an "unseen world" of 
their own experience or imagination - or invention.  
Children do that sort of thing successfully, but children 
are content to convince themselves, and do not vulgarise 
their beliefs by trying to convince other people.  
Leonard Bilsiter's beliefs were for "the few," that is to 
say, anyone who would listen to him.

His dabblings in the unseen might not have carried 
him beyond the customary platitudes of the drawing-room 
visionary if accident had not reinforced his stock-in-
trade of mystical lore.  In company with a friend, who 
was interested in a Ural mining concern, he had made a 
trip across Eastern Europe at a moment when the great 
Russian railway strike was developing from a threat to a 
reality; its outbreak caught him on the return journey, 
somewhere on the further side of Perm, and it was while 
waiting for a couple of days at a wayside station in a 
state of suspended locomotion that he made the 
acquaintance of a dealer in harness and metalware, who 
profitably whiled away the tedium of the long halt by 
initiating his English travelling companion in a 
fragmentary system of folk-lore that he had picked up 
from Trans-Baikal traders and natives.  Leonard returned 
to his home circle garrulous about his Russian strike 
experiences, but oppressively reticent about certain dark 
mysteries, which he alluded to under the resounding title 
of Siberian Magic.  The reticence wore off in a week or 
two under the influence of an entire lack of general 
curiosity, and Leonard began to make more detailed 
allusions to the enormous powers which this new esoteric 
force, to use his own description of it, conferred on the 
initiated few who knew how to wield it.  His aunt, 
Cecilia Hoops, who loved sensation perhaps rather better 
than she loved the truth, gave him as clamorous an 
advertisement as anyone could wish for by retailing an 
account of how he had turned a vegetable marrow into a 
wood pigeon before her very eyes.  As a manifestation of 
the possession of supernatural powers, the story was 
discounted in some quarters by the respect accorded to 
Mrs. Hoops' powers of imagination.

However divided opinion might be on the question of 
Leonard's status as a wonderworker or a charlatan, he 
certainly arrived at Mary Hampton's house-party with a 
reputation for pre-eminence in one or other of those 
professions, and he was not disposed to shun such 
publicity as might fall to his share.  Esoteric forces 
and unusual powers figured largely in whatever 
conversation he or his aunt had a share in, and his own 
performances, past and potential, were the subject of 
mysterious hints and dark avowals.

"I wish you would turn me into a wolf, Mr. 
Bilsiter," said his hostess at luncheon the day after his 
arrival.

"My dear Mary," said Colonel Hampton, "I never knew 
you had a craving in that direction."

"A she-wolf, of course," continued Mrs. Hampton; it 
would be too confusing to change one's sex as well as 
one's species at a moment's notice."

"I don't think one should jest on these subjects," 
said Leonard.

"I'm not jesting, I'm quite serious, I assure you.  
Only don't do it to-day; we have only eight available 
bridge players, and it would break up one of our tables.  
To-morrow we shall be a larger party.  To-morrow night, 
after dinner - "

"In our present imperfect understanding of these 
hidden forces I think one should approach them with 
humbleness rather than mockery," observed Leonard, with 
such severity that the subject was forthwith dropped.

Clovis Sangrail had sat unusually silent during the 
discussion on the possibilities of Siberian Magic; after 
lunch he side-tracked Lord Pabham into the comparative 
seclusion of the billiard-room and delivered himself of a 
searching question.

"Have you such a thing as a she-wolf in your 
collection of wild animals?  A she-wolf of moderately 
good temper?"

Lord Pabham considered.  "There is Loiusa," he said, 
"a rather fine specimen of the timber-wolf.  I got her 
two years ago in exchange for some Arctic foxes.  Most of 
my animals get to be fairly tame before they've been with 
me very long; I think I can say Louisa has an angelic 
temper, as she-wolves go. Why do you ask?"

"I was wondering whether you would lend her to me 
for to-morrow night," said Clovis, with the careless 
solicitude of one who borrows a collar stud or a tennis 
racquet.

"To-morrow night?"

"Yes, wolves are nocturnal animals, so the late 
hours won't hurt her," said Clovis, with the air of one 
who has taken everything into consideration; "one of your 
men could bring her over from Pabham Park after dusk, and 
with a little help he ought to be able to smuggle her 
into the conservatory at the same moment that Mary 
Hampton makes an unobtrusive exit."

Lord Pabham stared at Clovis for a moment in 
pardonable bewilderment; then his face broke into a 
wrinkled network of laughter.

"Oh, that's your game, is it?  You are going to do a 
little Siberian Magic on your own account.  And is Mrs. 
Hampton willing to be a fellow-conspirator?"

"Mary is pledged to see me through with it, if you 
will guarantee Louisa's temper."

"I'll answer for Louisa," said Lord Pabham.

By the following day the house-party had swollen to 
larger proportions, and Bilsiter's instinct for self-
advertisement expanded duly under the stimulant of an 
increased audience.  At dinner that evening he held forth 
at length on the subject of unseen forces and untested 
powers, and his flow of impressive eloquence continued 
unabated while coffee was being served in the drawing-
room preparatory to a general migration to the card-room.

His aunt ensured a respectful hearing for his 
utterances, but her sensation-loving soul hankered after 
something more dramatic than mere vocal demonstration.

"Won't you do something to CONVINCE them of your 
powers, Leonard?" she pleaded; "change something into 
another shape.  He can, you know, if he only chooses to," 
she informed the company.

"Oh, do," said Mavis Pellington earnestly, and her 
request was echoed by nearly everyone present.  Even 
those who were not open to conviction were perfectly 
willing to be entertained by an exhibition of amateur 
conjuring.

Leonard felt that something tangible was expected of 
him.

"Has anyone present," he asked, "got a three-penny 
bit or some small object of no particular value -?"

"You're surely not going to make coins disappear, or 
something primitive of that sort?" said Clovis 
contemptuously.

"I think it very unkind of you not to carry out my 
suggestion of turning me into a wolf," said Mary Hampton, 
as she crossed over to the conservatory to give her 
macaws their usual tribute from the dessert dishes.

"I have already warned you of the danger of treating 
these powers in a mocking spirit," said Leonard solemnly.

"I don't believe you can do it," laughed Mary 
provocatively from the conservatory; "I dare you to do it 
if you can.  I defy you to turn me into a wolf."

As she said this she was lost to view behind a clump 
of azaleas.

"Mrs. Hampton - " began Leonard with increased 
solemnity, but he got no further.  A breath of chill air 
seemed to rush across the room, and at the same time the 
macaws broke forth into ear-splitting screams.

"What on earth is the matter with those confounded 
birds, Mary?" exclaimed Colonel Hampton; at the same 
moment an even more piercing scream from Mavis Pellington 
stampeded the entire company from their seats.  In 
various attitudes of helpless horror or instinctive 
defence they confronted the evil-looking grey beast that 
was peering at them from amid a setting of fern and 
azalea.

Mrs. Hoops was the first to recover from the general 
chaos of fright and bewilderment.

"Leonard!" she screamed shrilly to her nephew, "turn 
it back into Mrs. Hampton at once!  It may fly at us at 
any moment.  Turn it back!"

"I - I don't know how to," faltered Leonard, who 
looked more scared and horrified than anyone.

"What!" shouted Colonel Hampton, "you've taken the 
abominable liberty of turning my wife into a wolf, and 
now you stand there calmly and say you can't turn her 
back again!"

To do strict justice to Leonard, calmness was not a 
distinguishing feature of his attitude at the moment.

"I assure you I didn't turn Mrs. Hampton into a 
wolf; nothing was farther from my intentions," he 
protested.

"Then where is she, and how came that animal into 
the conservatory?" demanded the Colonel.

"Of course we must accept your assurance that you 
didn't turn Mrs. Hampton into a wolf," said Clovis 
politely, "but you will agree that appearances are 
against you."

"Are we to have all these recriminations with that 
beast standing there ready to tear us to pieces?" wailed 
Mavis indignantly.

"Lord Pabham, you know a good deal about wild beasts 
- " suggested Colonel Hampton.

"The wild beasts that I have been accustomed to," 
said Lord Pabham, "have come with proper credentials from 
well-known dealers, or have been bred in my own 
menagerie.  I've never before been confronted with an 
animal that walks unconcernedly out of an azalea bush, 
leaving a charming and popular hostess unaccounted for.  
As far as one can judge from OUTWARD characteristics," he 
continued, "it has the appearance of a well-grown female 
of the North American timber-wolf, a variety of the 
common species CANIS LUPUS."

"Oh, never mind its Latin name," screamed Mavis, as 
the beast came a step or two further into the room; 
"can't you entice it away with food, and shut it up where 
it can't do any harm?"

"If it is really Mrs. Hampton, who has just had a 
very good dinner, I don't suppose food will appeal to it 
very strongly," said Clovis.

"Leonard," beseeched Mrs. Hoops tearfully, "even if 
this is none of your doing can't you use your great 
powers to turn this dreadful beast into something 
harmless before it bites us all - a rabbit or something?"

"I don't suppose Colonel Hampton would care to have 
his wife turned into a succession of fancy animals as 
though we were playing a round game with her," interposed 
Clovis.

"I absolutely forbid it," thundered the Colonel.

"Most wolves that I've had anything to do with have 
been inordinately fond of sugar," said Lord Pabham; "if 
you like I'll try the effect on this one."

He took a piece of sugar from the saucer of his 
coffee cup and flung it to the expectant Louisa, who 
snapped it in mid-air.  There was a sigh of relief from 
the company; a wolf that ate sugar when it might at the 
least have been employed in tearing macaws to pieces had 
already shed some of its terrors.  The sigh deepened to a 
gasp of thanks-giving when Lord Pabham decoyed the animal 
out of the room by a pretended largesse of further sugar.  
There was an instant rush to the vacated conservatory.  
There was no trace of Mrs. Hampton except the plate 
containing the macaws' supper.

"The door is locked on the inside!" exclaimed 
Clovis, who had deftly turned the key as he affected to 
test it.

Everyone turned towards Bilsiter.

"If you haven't turned my wife into a wolf," said 
Colonel Hampton, "will you kindly explain where she has 
disappeared to, since she obviously could not have gone 
through a locked door?  I will not press you for an 
explanation of how a North American timber-wolf suddenly 
appeared in the conservatory, but I think I have some 
right to inquire what has become of Mrs. Hampton."

Bilsiter's reiterated disclaimer was met with a 
general murmur of impatient disbelief.

"I refuse to stay another hour under this roof," 
declared Mavis Pellington.

"If our hostess has really vanished out of human 
form," said Mrs. Hoops, "none of the ladies of the party 
can very well remain.  I absolutely decline to be 
chaperoned by a wolf!"

"It's a she-wolf," said Clovis soothingly.

The correct etiquette to be observed under the 
unusual circumstances received no further elucidation.  
The sudden entry of Mary Hampton deprived the discussion 
of its immediate interest.

"Some one has mesmerised me," she exclaimed crossly; 
"I found myself in the game larder, of all places, being 
fed with sugar by Lord Pabham.  I hate being mesmerised, 
and the doctor has forbidden me to touch sugar."

The situation was explained to her, as far as it 
permitted of anything that could be called explanation.

"Then you REALLY did turn me into a wolf, Mr. 
Bilsiter?" she exclaimed excitedly.

But Leonard had burned the boat in which he might 
now have embarked on a sea of glory.  He could only shake 
his head feebly.

"It was I who took that liberty," said Clovis; "you 
see, I happen to have lived for a couple of years in 
North-Eastern Russia, and I have more than a tourist's 
acquaintance with the magic craft of that region.  One 
does not care to speak about these strange powers, but 
once in a way, when one hears a lot of nonsense being 
talked about them, one is tempted to show what Siberian 
magic can accomplish in the hands of someone who really 
understands it.  I yielded to that temptation.  May I 
have some brandy? the effort has left me rather faint."

If Leonard Bilsiter could at that moment have 
transformed Clovis into a cockroach and then have stepped 
on him he would gladly have performed both operations.

LAURA


"YOU are not really dying, are you?" asked Amanda.

"I have the doctor's permission to live till 
Tuesday," said Laura.

"But to-day is Saturday; this is serious!" gasped 
Amanda.

"I don't know about it being serious; it is 
certainly Saturday," said Laura.

"Death is always serious," said Amanda.

"I never said I was going to die.  I am presumably 
going to leave off being Laura, but I shall go on being 
something.  An animal of some kind, I suppose.  You see, 
when one hasn't been very good in the life one has just 
lived, one reincarnates in some lower organism.  And I 
haven't been very good, when one comes to think of it.  
I've been petty and mean and vindictive and all that sort 
of thing when circumstances have seemed to warrant it."

"Circumstances never warrant that sort of thing," 
said Amanda hastily.

"If you don't mind my saying so," observed Laura, 
"Egbert is a circumstance that would warrant any amount 
of that sort of thing.  You're married to him - that's 
different; you've sworn to love, honour, and endure him: 
I haven't."

"I don't see what's wrong with Egbert," protested 
Amanda.

"Oh, I daresay the wrongness has been on my part," 
admitted Laura dispassionately; "he has merely been the 
extenuating circumstance.  He made a thin, peevish kind 
of fuss, for instance, when I took the collie puppies 
from the farm out for a run the other day."

"They chased his young broods of speckled Sussex and 
drove two sitting hens off their nests, besides running 
all over the flower beds.  You know how devoted he is to 
his poultry and garden."

"Anyhow, he needn't have gone on about it for the 
entire evening and then have said, `Let's say no more 
about it' just when I was beginning to enjoy the 
discussion.  That's where one of my petty vindictive 
revenges came in," added Laura with an unrepentant 
chuckle; "I turned the entire family of speckled Sussex 
into his seedling shed the day after the puppy episode."

"How could you?" exclaimed Amanda.

"It came quite easy," said Laura; "two of the hens 
pretended to be laying at the time, but I was firm."

"And we thought it was an accident!"

"You see," resumed Laura, "I really HAVE some 
grounds for supposing that my next incarnation will be in 
a lower organism.  I shall be an animal of some kind.  On 
the other hand, I haven't been a bad sort in my way, so I 
think I may count on being a nice animal, something 
elegant and lively, with a love of fun.  An otter, 
perhaps."

"I can't imagine you as an otter," said Amanda.

"Well, I don't suppose you can imagine me as an 
angel, if it comes to that," said Laura.

Amanda was silent.  She couldn't.

"Personally I think an otter life would be rather 
enjoyable," continued Laura; "salmon to eat all the year 
round, and the satisfaction of being able to fetch the 
trout in their own homes without having to wait for hours 
till they condescend to rise to the fly you've been 
dangling before them; and an elegant svelte figure - "

"Think of the otter hounds," interposed Amanda; "how 
dreadful to be hunted and harried and finally worried to 
death!"

"Rather fun with half the neighbourhood looking on, 
and anyhow not worse than this Saturday-to-Tuesday 
business of dying by inches; and then I should go on into 
something else.  If I had been a moderately good otter I 
suppose I should get back into human shape of some sort; 
probably something rather primitive - a little brown, 
unclothed Nubian boy, I should think."

"I wish you would be serious," sighed Amanda; "you 
really ought to be if you're only going to live till 
Tuesday."

As a matter of fact Laura died on Monday.

"So dreadfully upsetting," Amanda complained to her 
uncle-in-law, Sir Lulworth Quayne.  "I've asked quite a 
lot of people down for golf and fishing, and the 
rhododendrons are just looking their best."

"Laura always was inconsiderate," said Sir Lulworth; 
"she was born during Goodwood week, with an Ambassador 
staying in the house who hated babies."

"She had the maddest kind of ideas," said Amanda; 
"do you know if there was any insanity in her family?"

"Insanity?  No, I never heard of any.  Her father 
lives in West Kensington, but I believe he's sane on all 
other subjects."

"She had an idea that she was going to be 
reincarnated as an otter," said Amanda.

"One meets with those ideas of reincarnation so 
frequently, even in the West," said Sir Lulworth, "that 
one can hardly set them down as being mad.  And Laura was 
such an unaccountable person in this life that I should 
not like to lay down definite rules as to what she might 
be doing in an after state."

"You think she really might have passed into some 
animal form?" asked Amanda.  She was one of those who 
shape their opinions rather readily from the standpoint 
of those around them.

Just then Egbert entered the breakfast-room, wearing 
an air of bereavement that Laura's demise would have been 
insufficient, in itself, to account for.

"Four of my speckled Sussex have been killed," he 
exclaimed; "the very four that were to go to the show on 
Friday.  One of them was dragged away and eaten right in 
the middle of that new carnation bed that I've been to 
such trouble and expense over.  My best flower bed and my 
best fowls singled out for destruction; it almost seems 
as if the brute that did the deed had special knowledge 
how to be as devastating as possible in a short space of 
time."

"Was it a fox, do you think?" asked Amanda.

"Sounds more like a polecat," said Sir Lulworth.

"No," said Egbert, "there were marks of webbed feet 
all over the place, and we followed the tracks down to 
the stream at the bottom of the garden; evidently an 
otter."

Amanda looked quickly and furtively across at Sir 
Lulworth.

Egbert was too agitated to eat any breakfast, and 
went out to superintend the strengthening of the poultry 
yard defences.

"I think she might at least have waited till the 
funeral was over," said Amanda in a scandalised voice.

"It's her own funeral, you know," said Sir Lulworth; 
"it's a nice point in etiquette how far one ought to show 
respect to one's own mortal remains."

Disregard for mortuary convention was carried to 
further lengths next day; during the absence of the 
family at the funeral ceremony the remaining survivors of 
the speckled Sussex were massacred.  The marauder's line 
of retreat seemed to have embraced most of the flower 
beds on the lawn, but the strawberry beds in the lower 
garden had also suffered.

"I shall get the otter hounds to come here at the 
earliest possible moment," said Egbert savagely.

"On no account!  You can't dream of such a thing!" 
exclaimed Amanda.  "I mean, it wouldn't do, so soon after 
a funeral in the house."

"It's a case of necessity," said Egbert; "once an 
otter takes to that sort of thing it won't stop."

"Perhaps it will go elsewhere now there are no more 
fowls left," suggested Amanda.

"One would think you wanted to shield the beast," 
said Egbert.

"There's been so little water in the stream lately," 
objected Amanda; "it seems hardly sporting to hunt an 
animal when it has so little chance of taking refuge 
anywhere."

"Good gracious!" fumed Egbert, "I'm not thinking 
about sport.  I want to have the animal killed as soon as 
possible."

Even Amanda's opposition weakened when, during 
church time on the following Sunday, the otter made its 
way into the house, raided half a salmon from the larder 
and worried it into scaly fragments on the Persian rug in 
Egbert's studio.

"We shall have it hiding under our beds and biting 
pieces out of our feet before long," said Egbert, and 
from what Amanda knew of this particular otter she felt 
that the possibility was not a remote one.

On the evening preceding the day fixed for the hunt 
Amanda spent a solitary hour walking by the banks of the 
stream, making what she imagined to be hound noises.  It 
was charitably supposed by those who overheard her 
performance, that she was practising for farmyard 
imitations at the forth-coming village entertainment.

It was her friend and neighbour, Aurora Burret, who 
brought her news of the day's sport.

"Pity you weren't out; we had quite a good day.  We 
found at once, in the pool just below your garden."

"Did you - kill?" asked Amanda.

"Rather.  A fine she-otter.  Your husband got rather 
badly bitten in trying to 'tail it.'  Poor beast, I felt 
quite sorry for it, it had such a human look in its eyes 
when it was killed.  You'll call me silly, but do you 
know who the look reminded me of?  My dear woman, what is 
the matter?"

When Amanda had recovered to a certain extent from 
her attack of nervous prostration Egbert took her to the 
Nile Valley to recuperate.  Change of scene speedily 
brought about the desired recovery of health and mental 
balance.  The escapades of an adventurous otter in search 
of a variation of diet were viewed in their proper light.  
Amanda's normally placid temperament reasserted itself.  
Even a hurricane of shouted curses, coming from her 
husband's dressing-room, in her husband's voice, but 
hardly in his usual vocabulary, failed to disturb her 
serenity as she made a leisurely toilet one evening in a 
Cairo hotel.

"What is the matter?  What has happened?" she asked 
in amused curiosity.

"The little beast has thrown all my clean shirts 
into the bath!  Wait till I catch you, you little - "

"What little beast?" asked Amanda, suppressing a 
desire to laugh; Egbert's language was so hopelessly 
inadequate to express his outraged feelings.

"A little beast of a naked brown Nubian boy," 
spluttered Egbert.

And now Amanda is seriously ill.


THE BOAR-PIG

"THERE is a back way on to the lawn," said Mrs. 
Philidore Stossen to her daughter, "through a small grass 
paddock and then through a walled fruit garden full of 
gooseberry bushes.  I went all over the place last year 
when the family were away.  There is a door that opens 
from the fruit garden into a shrubbery, and once we 
emerge from there we can mingle with the guests as if we 
had come in by the ordinary way.  It's much safer than 
going in by the front entrance and running the risk of 
coming bang up against the hostess; that would be so 
awkward when she doesn't happen to have invited us."

"Isn't it a lot of trouble to take for getting 
admittance to a garden party?"

"To a garden party, yes; to THE garden party of the 
season, certainly not.  Every one of any consequence in 
the county, with the exception of ourselves, has been 
asked to meet the Princess, and it would be far more 
troublesome to invent explanations as to why we weren't 
there than to get in by a roundabout way.  I stopped Mrs. 
Cuvering in the road yesterday and talked very pointedly 
about the Princess.  If she didn't choose to take the 
hint and send me an invitation it's not my fault, is it?  
Here we are: we just cut across the grass and through 
that little gate into the garden."

Mrs. Stossen and her daughter, suitably arrayed for 
a county garden party function with an infusion of 
Almanack de Gotha, sailed through the narrow grass 
paddock and the ensuing gooseberry garden with the air of 
state barges making an unofficial progress along a rural 
trout stream.  There was a certain amount of furtive 
haste mingled with the stateliness of their advance, as 
though hostile search-lights might be turned on them at 
any moment; and, as a matter of fact, they were not 
unobserved.  Matilda Cuvering, with the alert eyes of 
thirteen years old and the added advantage of an exalted 
position in the branches of a medlar tree, had enjoyed a 
good view of the Stossen flanking movement and had 
foreseen exactly where it would break down in execution.

"They'll find the door locked, and they'll jolly 
well have to go back the way they came," she remarked to 
herself.  "Serves them right for not coming in by the 
proper entrance.  What a pity Tarquin Superbus isn't 
loose in the paddock.  After all, as every one else is 
enjoying themselves, I don't see why Tarquin shouldn't 
have an afternoon out."

Matilda was of an age when thought is action; she 
slid down from the branches of the medlar tree, and when 
she clambered back again Tarquin, the huge white 
Yorkshire boar-pig, had exchanged the narrow limits of 
his stye for the wider range of the grass paddock.  The 
discomfited Stossen expedition, returning in 
recriminatory but otherwise orderly retreat from the 
unyielding obstacle of the locked door, came to a sudden 
halt at the gate dividing the paddock from the gooseberry 
garden.

"What a villainous-looking animal," exclaimed Mrs. 
Stossen; "it wasn't there when we came in."

"It's there now, anyhow," said her daughter.  "What 
on earth are we to do?  I wish we had never come."

The boar-pig had drawn nearer to the gate for a 
closer inspection of the human intruders, and stood 
champing his jaws and blinking his small red eyes in a 
manner that was doubtless intended to be disconcerting, 
and, as far as the Stossens were concerned, thoroughly 
achieved that result.

"Shoo!  Hish!  Hish!  Shoo!" cried the ladies in 
chorus.

"If they think they're going to drive him away by 
reciting lists of the kings of Israel and Judah they're 
laying themselves out for disappointment," observed 
Matilda from her seat in the medlar tree.  As she made 
the observation aloud Mrs. Stossen became for the first 
time aware of her presence.  A moment or two earlier she 
would have been anything but pleased at the discovery 
that the garden was not as deserted as it looked, but now 
she hailed the fact of the child's presence on the scene 
with absolute relief.

"Little girl, can you find some one to drive away - 
" she began hopefully.

"COMMENT? COMPRENDS PAS," was the response.

"Oh, are you French?  ETES VOUS FRANCAISE?"

"PAS DE TOUS.  'SUIS ANGLAISE."

"Then why not talk English?  I want to know if - "

"PERMETTEZ-MOI EXPLIQUER.  You see, I'm rather under 
a cloud," said Matilda.  "I'm staying with my aunt, and I 
was told I must behave particularly well to-day, as lots 
of people were coming for a garden party, and I was told 
to imitate Claude, that's my young cousin, who never does 
anything wrong except by accident, and then is always 
apologetic about it.  It seems they thought I ate too 
much raspberry trifle at lunch, and they said Claude 
never eats too much raspberry trifle.  Well, Claude 
always goes to sleep for half an hour after lunch, 
because he's told to, and I waited till he was asleep, 
and tied his hands and started forcible feeding with a 
whole bucketful of raspberry trifle that they were 
keeping for the garden-party.  Lots of it went on to his 
sailor-suit and some of it on to the bed, but a good deal 
went down Claude's throat, and they can't say again that 
he has never been known to eat too much raspberry trifle.  
That is why I am not allowed to go to the party, and as 
an additional punishment I must speak French all the 
afternoon.  I've had to tell you all this in English, as 
there were words like `forcible feeding' that I didn't 
know the French for; of course I could have invented 
them, but if I had said NOURRITURE OBLIGATOIRE you 
wouldn't have had the least idea what I was talking 
about.  MAIS MAINTENANT, NOUS PARLONS FRANCAIS."

"Oh, very well, TRES BIEN," said Mrs. Stossen 
reluctantly; in moments of flurry such French as she knew 
was not under very good control.  "LA, A L'AUTRE COTE DE 
LA PORTE, EST UN COCHON - "

"UN COCHON? AH, LE PETIT CHARMANT!" exclaimed 
Matilda with enthusiasm.

"MAIS NON, PAS DU TOUT PETIT, ET PAS DU TOUT 
CHARMANT; UN BETE FEROCE - "

"UNE BETE," corrected Matilda; "a pig is masculine 
as long as you call it a pig, but if you lose your temper 
with it and call it a ferocious beast it becomes one of 
us at once.  French is a dreadfully unsexing language."

"For goodness' sake let us talk English then," said 
Mrs. Stossen.  "Is there any way out of this garden 
except through the paddock where the pig is?"

"I always go over the wall, by way of the plum 
tree," said Matilda.

"Dressed as we are we could hardly do that," said 
Mrs. Stossen; it was difficult to imagine her doing it in 
any costume.

"Do you think you could go and get some one who 
would drive the pig away?" asked Miss Stossen.

"I promised my aunt I would stay here till five 
o'clock; it's not four yet."

"I am sure, under the circumstances, your aunt would 
permit - "

"My conscience would not permit," said Matilda with 
cold dignity.

"We can't stay here till five o'clock," exclaimed 
Mrs. Stossen with growing exasperation.

"Shall I recite to you to make the time pass 
quicker?" asked Matilda obligingly.  " `Belinda, the 
little Breadwinner,' is considered my best piece, or, 
perhaps, it ought to be something in French.  Henri 
Quatre's address to his soldiers is the only thing I 
really know in that language."

"If you will go and fetch some one to drive that 
animal away I will give you something to buy yourself a 
nice present," said Mrs. Stossen.

Matilda came several inches lower down the medlar 
tree.

"That is the most practical suggestion you have made 
yet for getting out of the garden," she remarked 
cheerfully; "Claude and I are collecting money for the 
Children's Fresh Air Fund, and we are seeing which of us 
can collect the biggest sum."

"I shall be very glad to contribute half a crown, 
very glad indeed," said Mrs. Stossen, digging that coin 
out of the depths of a receptacle which formed a detached 
outwork of her toilet.

"Claude is a long way ahead of me at present," 
continued Matilda, taking no notice of the suggested 
offering; "you see, he's only eleven, and has golden 
hair, and those are enormous advantages when you're on 
the collecting job.  Only the other day a Russian lady 
gave him ten shillings.  Russians understand the art of 
giving far better than we do.  I expect Claude will net 
quite twenty-five shillings this afternoon; he'll have 
the field to himself, and he'll be able to do the pale, 
fragile, not-long-for-this-world business to perfection 
after his raspberry trifle experience.  Yes, he'll be 
QUITE two pounds ahead of me by now."

With much probing and plucking and many regretful 
murmurs the beleaguered ladies managed to produce seven-
and-sixpence between them.

"I am afraid this is all we've got," said Mrs. 
Stossen.

Matilda showed no sign of coming down either to the 
earth or to their figure.

"I could not do violence to my conscience for 
anything less than ten shillings," she announced stiffly.

Mother and daughter muttered certain remarks under 
their breath, in which the word "beast" was prominent, 
and probably had no reference to Tarquin.

"I find I HAVE got another half-crown," said Mrs. 
Stossen in a shaking voice; "here you are.  Now please 
fetch some one quickly."

Matilda slipped down from the tree, took possession 
of the donation, and proceeded to pick up a handful of 
over-ripe medlars from the grass at her feet.  Then she 
climbed over the gate and addressed herself 
affectionately to the boar-pig.

"Come, Tarquin, dear old boy; you know you can't 
resist medlars when they're rotten and squashy."

Tarquin couldn't.  By dint of throwing the fruit in 
front of him at judicious intervals Matilda decoyed him 
back to his stye, while the delivered captives hurried 
across the paddock.

"Well, I never!  The little minx!" exclaimed Mrs. 
Stossen when she was safely on the high road.  "The 
animal wasn't savage at all, and as for the ten 
shillings, I don't believe the Fresh Air Fund will see a 
penny of it!"

There she was unwarrantably harsh in her judgment.  
If you examine the books of the fund you will find the 
acknowledgment: "Collected by Miss Matilda Cuvering, 2s. 
6d."


THE BROGUE


THE hunting season had come to an end, and the 
Mullets had not succeeded in selling the Brogue.  There 
had been a kind of tradition in the family for the past 
three or four years, a sort of fatalistic hope, that the 
Brogue would find a purchaser before the hunting was 
over; but seasons came and went without anything 
happening to justify such ill-founded optimism.  The 
animal had been named Berserker in the earlier stages of 
its career; it had been rechristened the Brogue later on, 
in recognition of the fact that, once acquired, it was 
extremely difficult to get rid of.  The unkinder wits of 
the neighbourhood had been known to suggest that the 
first letter of its name was superfluous.  The Brogue had 
been variously described in sale catalogues as a light-
weight hunter, a lady's hack, and, more simply, but still 
with a touch of imagination, as a useful brown gelding, 
standing 15.1.  Toby Mullet had ridden him for four 
seasons with the West Wessex; you can ride almost any 
sort of horse with the West Wessex as long as it is an 
animal that knows the country.  The Brogue knew the 
country intimately, having personally created most of the 
gaps that were to be met with in banks and hedges for 
many miles round.  His manners and characteristics were 
not ideal in the hunting field, but he was probably 
rather safer to ride to hounds than he was as a hack on 
country roads.  According to the Mullet family, he was 
not really road-shy, but there were one or two objects of 
dislike that brought on sudden attacks of what Toby 
called the swerving sickness.  Motors and cycles he 
treated with tolerant disregard, but pigs, wheelbarrows, 
piles of stones by the roadside, perambulators in a 
village street, gates painted too aggressively white, and 
sometimes, but not always, the newer kind of beehives, 
turned him aside from his tracks in vivid imitation of 
the zigzag course of forked lightning.  If a pheasant 
rose noisily from the other side of a hedgerow the Brogue 
would spring into the air at the same moment, but this 
may have been due to a desire to be companionable.  The 
Mullet family contradicted the widely prevalent report 
that the horse was a confirmed crib-biter.

It was about the third week in May that Mrs. Mullet, 
relict of the late Sylvester Mullet, and mother of Toby 
and a bunch of daughters, assailed Clovis Sangrail on the 
outskirts of the village with a breathless catalogue of 
local happenings.

"You know our new neighbour, Mr. Penricarde?" she 
vociferated; "awfully rich, owns tin mines in Cornwall, 
middle-aged and rather quiet.  He's taken the Red House 
on a long lease and spent a lot of money on alterations 
and improvements.  Well, Toby's sold him the Brogue!"

Clovis spent a moment or two in assimilating the 
astonishing news; then he broke out into unstinted 
congratulation.  If he had belonged to a more emotional 
race he would probably have kissed Mrs. Mullet.

"How wonderfully lucky to have pulled it off at 
last!  Now you can buy a decent animal.  I've always said 
that Toby was clever.  Ever so many congratulations."

"Don't congratulate me.  It's the most unfortunate 
thing that could have happened!" said Mrs. Mullet 
dramatically.

Clovis stared at her in amazement.

"Mr. Penricarde," said Mrs. Mullet, sinking her 
voice to what she imagined to be an impressive whisper, 
though it rather resembled a hoarse, excited squeak, "Mr. 
Penricarde has just begun to pay attentions to Jessie.  
Slight at first, but now unmistakable.  I was a fool not 
to have seen it sooner.  Yesterday, at the Rectory garden 
party, he asked her what her favourite flowers were, and 
she told him carnations, and to-day a whole stack of 
carnations has arrived, clove and malmaison and lovely 
dark red ones, regular exhibition blooms, and a box of 
chocolates that he must have got on purpose from London.  
And he's asked her to go round the links with him to-
morrow.  And now, just at this critical moment, Toby has 
sold him that animal.  It's a calamity!"

"But you've been trying to get the horse off your 
hands for years," said Clovis.

"I've got a houseful of daughters," said Mrs. 
Mullet, "and I've been trying - well, not to get them off 
my hands, of course, but a husband or two wouldn't be 
amiss among the lot of them; there are six of them, you 
know."

"I don't know," said Clovis, "I've never counted, 
but I expect you're right as to the number; mothers 
generally know these things."

"And now," continued Mrs. Mullet, in her tragic 
whisper, "when there's a rich husband-in-prospect 
imminent on the horizon Toby goes and sells him that 
miserable animal.  It will probably kill him if he tries 
to ride it; anyway it will kill any affection he might 
have felt towards any member of our family.  What is to 
be done?  We can't very well ask to have the horse back; 
you see, we praised it up like anything when we thought 
there was a chance of his buying it, and said it was just 
the animal to suit him."

"Couldn't you steal it out of his stable and send it 
to grass at some farm miles away?" suggested Clovis; 
"write 'Votes for Women' on the stable door, and the 
thing would pass for a Suffragette outrage.  No one who 
knew the horse could possibly suspect you of wanting to 
get it back again."

"Every newspaper in the country would ring with the 
affair," said Mrs. Mullet; "can't you imagine the 
headline, 'Valuable Hunter Stolen by Suffragettes'?  The 
police would scour the countryside till they found the 
animal."

"Well, Jessie must try and get it back from 
Penricarde on the plea that it's an old favourite.  She 
can say it was only sold because the stable had to be 
pulled down under the terms of an old repairing lease, 
and that now it has been arranged that the stable is to 
stand for a couple of years longer."

"It sounds a queer proceeding to ask for a horse 
back when you've just sold him," said Mrs. Mullet, "but 
something must be done, and done at once.  The man is not 
used to horses, and I believe I told him it was as quiet 
as a lamb.  After all, lambs go kicking and twisting 
about as if they were demented, don't they?"

"The lamb has an entirely unmerited character for 
sedateness," agreed Clovis.

Jessie came back from the golf links next day in a 
state of mingled elation and concern.

"It's all right about the proposal," she announced 
he came out with it at the sixth hole.  I said I must 
have time to think it over.  I accepted him at the 
seventh."

"My dear," said her mother, "I think a little more 
maidenly reserve and hesitation would have been 
advisable, as you've known him so short a time.  You 
might have waited till the ninth hole."

"The seventh is a very long hole," said Jessie; 
"besides, the tension was putting us both off our game.  
By the time we'd got to the ninth hole we'd settled lots 
of things.  The honeymoon is to be spent in Corsica, with 
perhaps a flying visit to Naples if we feel like it, and 
a week in London to wind up with.  Two of his nieces are 
to be asked to be bridesmaids, so with our lot there will 
be seven, which is rather a lucky number.  You are to 
wear your pearl grey, with any amount of Honiton lace 
jabbed into it.  By the way, he's coming over this 
evening to ask your consent to the whole affair.  So far 
all's well, but about the Brogue it's a different matter.  
I told him the legend about the stable, and how keen we 
were about buying the horse back, but he seems equally 
keen on keeping it.  He said he must have horse exercise 
now that he's living in the country, and he's going to 
start riding tomorrow.  He's ridden a few times in the 
Row, on an animal that was accustomed to carry 
octogenarians and people undergoing rest cures, and 
that's about all his experience in the saddle - oh, and 
he rode a pony once in Norfolk, when he was fifteen and 
the pony twenty-four; and tomorrow he's going to ride the 
Brogue!  I shall be a widow before I'm married, and I do 
so want to see what Corsica's like; it looks so silly on 
the map."

Clovis was sent for in haste, and the developments 
of the situation put before him.

"Nobody can ride that animal with any safety," said 
Mrs. Mullet, "except Toby, and he knows by long 
experience what it is going to shy at, and manages to 
swerve at the same time."

"I did hint to Mr. Penricarde - to Vincent, I should 
say - that the Brogue didn't like white gates," said 
Jessie.

"White gates!" exclaimed Mrs. Mullet; "did you 
mention what effect a pig has on him?  He'll have to go 
past Lockyer's farm to get to the high road, and there's 
sure to be a pig or two grunting about in the lane."

"He's taken rather a dislike to turkeys lately," 
said Toby.

"It's obvious that Penricarde mustn't be allowed to 
go out on that animal," said Clovis, "at least not till 
Jessie has married him, and tired of him.  I tell you 
what: ask him to a picnic to-morrow, starting at an early 
hour; he's not the sort to go out for a ride before 
breakfast.  The day after I'll get the rector to drive 
him over to Crowleigh before lunch, to see the new 
cottage hospital they're building there.  The Brogue will 
be standing idle in the stable and Toby can offer to 
exercise it; then it can pick up a stone or something of 
the sort and go conveniently lame.  If you hurry on the 
wedding a bit the lameness fiction can be kept up till 
the ceremony is safely over."

Mrs. Mullet belonged to an emotional race, and she 
kissed Clovis.

It was nobody's fault that the rain came down in 
torrents the next morning, making a picnic a fantastic 
impossibility.  It was also nobody's fault, but sheer 
ill-luck, that the weather cleared up sufficiently in the 
afternoon to tempt Mr. Penricarde to make his first essay 
with the Brogue.  They did not get as far as the pigs at 
Lockyer's farm; the rectory gate was painted a dull 
unobtrusive green, but it had been white a year or two 
ago, and the Brogue never forgot that he had been in the 
habit of making a violent curtsey, a back-pedal and a 
swerve at this particular point of the road.  
Subsequently, there being apparently no further call on 
his services, he broke his way into the rectory orchard, 
where he found a hen turkey in a coop; later visitors to 
the orchard found the coop almost intact, but very little 
left of the turkey.

Mr. Penricarde, a little stunned and shaken, and 
suffering from a bruised knee and some minor damages, 
good-naturedly ascribed the accident to his own 
inexperience with horses and country roads, and allowed 
Jessie to nurse him back into complete recovery and golf-
fitness within something less than a week.

In the list of wedding presents which the local 
newspaper published a fortnight or so later appeared the 
following item:

"Brown saddle-horse, 'The Brogue,' bridegroom's gift 
to bride."

"Which shows," said Toby Mullet, "that he knew 
nothing."

"Or else," said Clovis, "that he has a very pleasing 
wit."


THE HEN


"DORA BITTHOLZ is coming on Thursday," said Mrs. 
Sangrail.

"This next Thursday?  " asked Clovis

His mother nodded.

"You've rather done it, haven't you?" he chuckled; 
"Jane Martlet has only been here five days, and she never 
stays less than a fortnight, even when she's asked 
definitely for a week.  You'll never get her out of the 
house by Thursday."

"Why should I?" asked Mrs. Sangrail; "she and Dora 
are good friends, aren't they?  They used to be, as far 
as I remember."

"They used to be; that's what makes them all the 
more bitter now.  Each feels that she has nursed a viper 
in her bosom.  Nothing fans the flame of human resentment 
so much as the discovery that one's bosom has been 
utilised as a snake sanatorium."

"But what has happened?  Has some one been making 
mischief?"

"Not exactly," said Clovis; "a hen came between 
them."

"A hen?  What hen?"

"It was a bronze Leghorn or some such exotic breed, 
and Dora sold it to Jane at a rather exotic price.  They 
both go in for prize poultry, you know, and Jane thought 
she was going to get her money back in a large family of 
pedigree chickens.  The bird turned out to be an 
abstainer from the egg habit, and I'm told that the 
letters which passed between the two women were a 
revelation as to how much invective could be got on to a 
sheet of notepaper."

"How ridiculous!" said Mrs. Sangrail.  "Couldn't 
some of their friends compose the quarrel?"

"People tried," said Clovis, "but it must have been 
rather like composing the storm music of the `Fliegende 
Hollander.'  Jane was willing to take back some of her 
most libellous remarks if Dora would take back the hen, 
but Dora said that would be owning herself in the wrong, 
and you know she'd as soon think of owning slum property 
in Whitechapel as do that."

"It's a most awkward situation," said Mrs. Sangrail.  
"Do you suppose they won't speak to one another?"

"On the contrary, the difficulty will be to get them 
to leave off.  Their remarks on each other's conduct and 
character have hitherto been governed by the fact that 
only four ounces of plain speaking can be sent through 
the post for a penny."

"I can't put Dora off," said Mrs. Sangrail.  "I've 
already postponed her visit once, and nothing short of a 
miracle would make Jane leave before her self-allotted 
fortnight is over."

"Miracles are rather in my line," said Clovis.  "I 
don't pretend to be very hopeful in this case but I'll do 
my best."

"As long as you don't drag me into it - " stipulated 
his mother.

* * * *

"Servants are a bit of a nuisance," muttered Clovis, 
as he sat in the smoking-room after lunch, talking 
fitfully to Jane Martlet in the intervals of putting 
together the materials of a cocktail, which he had 
irreverently patented under the name of an Ella Wheeler 
Wilcox.  It was partly compounded of old brandy and 
partly of curacoa; there were other ingredients, but they 
were never indiscriminately revealed.

"Servants a nuisance!" exclaimed Jane, bounding into 
the topic with the exuberant plunge of a hunter when it 
leaves the high road and feels turf under its hoofs; "I 
should think they were!  The trouble I've had in getting 
suited this year you would hardly believe.  But I don't 
see what you have to complain of - your mother is so 
wonderfully lucky in her servants.  Sturridge, for 
instance - he's been with you for years, and I'm sure 
he's a paragon as butlers go."

"That's just the trouble," said Clovis.  "It's when 
servants have been with you for years that they become a 
really serious nuisance.  The 'here to-day and gone to-
morrow' sort don't matter - you've simply got to replace 
them; it's the stayers and the paragons that are the real 
worry."

"But if they give satisfaction - "

"That doesn't prevent them from giving trouble.  
Now, you've mentioned Sturridge - it was Sturridge I was 
particularly thinking of when I made the observation 
about servants being a nuisance."

"The excellent Sturridge a nuisance!  I can't 
believe it."

"I know he's excellent, and we just couldn't get 
along without him; he's the one reliable element in this 
rather haphazard household.  But his very orderliness has 
had an effect on him.  Have you ever considered what it 
must be like to go on unceasingly doing the correct thing 
in the correct manner in the same surroundings for the 
greater part of a lifetime?  To know and ordain and 
superintend exactly what silver and glass and table linen 
shall be used and set out on what occasions, to have 
cellar and pantry and plate-cupboard under a minutely 
devised and undeviating administration, to be noiseless, 
impalpable, omnipresent, and, as far as your own 
department is concerned, omniscient?"

"I should go mad," said Jane with conviction.

"Exactly," said Clovis thoughtfully, swallowing his 
completed Ella Wheeler Wilcox.

"But Sturridge hasn't gone mad," said Jane with a 
flutter of inquiry in her voice.

"On most points he's thoroughly sane and reliable," 
said Clovis, "but at times he is subject to the most 
obstinate delusions, and on those occasions he becomes 
not merely a nuisance but a decided embarrassment."

"What sort of delusions?"

"Unfortunately they usually centre round one of the 
guests of the house party, and that is where the 
awkwardness comes in.  For instance, he took it into his 
head that Matilda Sheringham was the Prophet Elijah, and 
as all that he remembered about Elijah's history was the 
episode of the ravens in the wilderness he absolutely 
declined to interfere with what he imagined to be 
Matilda's private catering arrangements, wouldn't allow 
any tea to be sent up to her in the morning, and if he 
was waiting at table he passed her over altogether in 
handing round the dishes."

"How very unpleasant.  Whatever did you do about 
it?"

"Oh, Matilda got fed, after a fashion, but it was 
judged to be best for her to cut her visit short.  It was 
really the only thing to be done," said Clovis with some 
emphasis.

"I shouldn't have done that," said Jane, "I should 
have humoured him in some way.  I certainly shouldn't 
have gone away."

Clovis frowned.

"It is not always wise to humour people when they 
get these ideas into their heads.  There's no knowing to 
what lengths they may go if you encourage them."

"You don't mean to say he might be dangerous, do 
you?" asked Jane with some anxiety.

"One can never be certain," said Clovis; "now and 
then he gets some idea about a guest which might take an 
unfortunate turn.  That is precisely what is worrying me 
at the present moment."

"What, has he taken a fancy about some one here 
now?" asked Jane excitedly; "how thrilling!  Do tell me 
who it is."

You," said Clovis briefly.

"Me?"

Clovis nodded.

"Who on earth does he think I am?"

"Queen Anne," was the unexpected answer.

"Queen Anne!  What an idea.  But, anyhow, there's 
nothing dangerous about her; she's such a colourless 
personality."

"What does posterity chiefly say about Queen Anne?" 
asked Clovis rather sternly.

"The only thing that I can remember about her," said 
Jane, "is the saying 'Queen Anne's dead.'"

"Exactly," said Clovis, staring at the glass that 
had held the Ella Wheeler Wilcox, "dead."

"Do you mean he takes me for the ghost of Queen 
Anne?" asked Jane.

"Ghost?  Dear no.  No one ever heard of a ghost that 
came down to breakfast and ate kidneys and toast and 
honey with a healthy appetite.  No, it's the fact of you 
being so very much alive and flourishing that perplexes 
and annoys him.  All his life he has been accustomed to 
look on Queen Anne as the personification of everything 
that is dead and done with, 'as dead as Queen Anne,' you 
know; and now he has to fill your glass at lunch and 
dinner and listen to your accounts of the gay time you 
had at the Dublin Horse Show, and naturally he feels that 
something's very wrong with you."

"But he wouldn't be downright hostile to me on that 
account, would he?" Jane asked anxiously.

"I didn't get really alarmed about it till lunch to-
day," said Clovis; "I caught him glowering at you with a 
very sinister look and muttering: 'Ought to be dead long 
ago, she ought, and some one should see to it.'  That's 
why I mentioned the matter to you."

"This is awful," said Jane; "your mother must be 
told about it at once."

"My mother mustn't hear a word about it," said 
Clovis earnestly; "it would upset her dreadfully.  She 
relies on Sturridge for everything."

"But he might kill me at any moment," protested 
Jane.

"Not at any moment; he's busy with the silver all 
the afternoon."

"You'll have to keep a sharp look-out all the time 
and be on your guard to frustrate any murderous attack," 
said Jane, adding in a tone of weak obstinacy: "It's a 
dreadful situation to be in, with a mad butler dangling 
over you like the sword of What's-his-name, but I'm 
certainly not going to cut my visit short."

Clovis swore horribly under his breath; the miracle 
was an obvious misfire.

It was in the hall the next morning after a late 
breakfast that Clovis had his final inspiration as he 
stood engaged in coaxing rust spots from an old putter.

"Where is Miss Martlet?" he asked the butler, who 
was at that moment crossing the hall.

"Writing letters in the morning-room, sir," said 
Sturridge, announcing a fact of which his questioner was 
already aware.

"She wants to copy the inscription on that old 
basket-hilted sabre," said Clovis, pointing to a 
venerable weapon hanging on the wall.  "I wish you'd take 
it to her; my hands are all over oil.  Take it without 
the sheath, it will be less trouble."

The butler drew the blade, still keen and bright in 
its well-cared for old age, and carried it into the 
morning-room.  There was a door near the writing-table 
leading to a back stairway; Jane vanished through it with 
such lightning rapidity that the butler doubted whether 
she had seen him come in.  Half an hour later Clovis was 
driving her and her hastily-packed luggage to the 
station.

"Mother will be awfully vexed when she comes back 
from her ride and finds you have gone," he observed to 
the departing guest, "but I'll make up some story about 
an urgent wire having called you away.  It wouldn't do to 
alarm her unnecessarily about Sturridge."

Jane sniffed slightly at Clovis' ideas of 
unnecessary alarm, and was almost rude to the young man 
who came round with thoughtful inquiries as to luncheon-
baskets.

The miracle lost some of its usefulness from the 
fact that Dora wrote the same day postponing the date of 
her visit, but, at any rate, Clovis holds the record as 
the only human being who ever hustled Jane Martlet out of 
the time-table of her migrations.


THE OPEN WINDOW


"MY aunt will be down presently, Mr. Nuttel," said a 
very self-possessed young lady of fifteen; "in the 
meantime you must try and put up with me."

Framton Nuttel endeavoured to say the correct 
something which should duly flatter the niece of the 
moment without unduly discounting the aunt that was to 
come.  Privately he doubted more than ever whether these 
formal visits on a succession of total strangers would do 
much towards helping the nerve cure which he was supposed 
to be undergoing.

"I know how it will be," his sister had said when he 
was preparing to migrate to this rural retreat; "you will 
bury yourself down there and not speak to a living soul, 
and your nerves will be worse than ever from moping.  I 
shall just give you letters of introduction to all the 
people I know there.  Some of them, as far as I can 
remember, were quite nice."

Framton wondered whether Mrs. Sappleton, the lady to 
whom he was presenting one of the letters of 
introduction, came into the nice division.

"Do you know many of the people round here?" asked 
the niece, when she judged that they had had sufficient 
silent communion.

"Hardly a soul," said Framton.  "My sister was 
staying here, at the rectory, you know, some four years 
ago, and she gave me letters of introduction to some of 
the people here."

He made the last statement in a tone of distinct 
regret.

"Then you know practically nothing about my aunt?" 
pursued the self-possessed young lady.

"Only her name and address," admitted the caller.  
He was wondering whether Mrs. Sappleton was in the 
married or widowed state.  An undefinable something about 
the room seemed to suggest masculine habitation.

"Her great tragedy happened just three years ago," 
said the child; "that would be since your sister's time."

"Her tragedy?" asked Framton; somehow in this 
restful country spot tragedies seemed out of place.

"You may wonder why we keep that window wide open on 
an October afternoon," said the niece, indicating a large 
French window that opened on to a lawn.

 "It is quite warm for the time of the year," said 
Framton; "but has that window got anything to do with the 
tragedy?"

"Out through that window, three years ago to a day, 
her husband and her two young brothers went off for their 
day's shooting.  They never came back.  In crossing the 
moor to their favourite snipe-shooting ground they were 
all three engulfed in a treacherous piece of bog.  It had 
been that dreadful wet summer, you know, and places that 
were safe in other years gave way suddenly without 
warning.  Their bodies were never recovered.  That was 
the dreadful part of it."  Here the child's voice lost 
its self-possessed note and became falteringly human.  
"Poor aunt always thinks that they will come back some 
day, they and the little brown spaniel that was lost with 
them, and walk in at that window just as they used to do.  
That is why the window is kept open every evening till it 
is quite dusk.  Poor dear aunt, she has often told me how 
they went out, her husband with his white waterproof coat 
over his arm, and Ronnie, her youngest brother, singing 
'Bertie, why do you bound?' as he always did to tease 
her, because she said it got on her nerves.  Do you know, 
sometimes on still, quiet evenings like this, I almost 
get a creepy feeling that they will all walk in through 
that window - "

She broke off with a little shudder.  It was a 
relief to Framton when the aunt bustled into the room 
with a whirl of apologies for being late in making her 
appearance.

"I hope Vera has been amusing you?" she said.

"She has been very interesting," said Framton.

"I hope you don't mind the open window," said Mrs. 
Sappleton briskly; "my husband and brothers will be home 
directly from shooting, and they always come in this way.  
They've been out for snipe in the marshes to-day, so 
they'll make a fine mess over my poor carpets.  So like 
you men-folk, isn't it?"

She rattled on cheerfully about the shooting and the 
scarcity of birds, and the prospects for duck in the 
winter.  To Framton it was all purely horrible.  He made 
a desperate but only partially successful effort to turn 
the talk on to a less ghastly topic; he was conscious 
that his hostess was giving him only a fragment of her 
attention, and her eyes were constantly straying past him 
to the open window and the lawn beyond.  It was certainly 
an unfortunate coincidence that he should have paid his 
visit on this tragic anniversary.

"The doctors agree in ordering me complete rest, an 
absence of mental excitement, and avoidance of anything 
in the nature of violent physical exercise," announced 
Framton, who laboured under the tolerably wide-spread 
delusion that total strangers and chance acquaintances 
are hungry for the least detail of one's ailments and 
infirmities, their cause and cure.  "On the matter of 
diet they are not so much in agreement," he continued.

"No?" said Mrs. Sappleton, in a voice which only 
replaced a yawn at the last moment.  Then she suddenly 
brightened into alert attention - but not to what Framton 
was saying.

"Here they are at last!" she cried.  "Just in time 
for tea, and don't they look as if they were muddy up to 
the eyes!"

Framton shivered slightly and turned towards the 
niece with a look intended to convey sympathetic 
comprehension.  The child was staring out through the 
open window with dazed horror in her eyes.  In a chill 
shock of nameless fear Framton swung round in his seat 
and looked in the same direction.

In the deepening twilight three figures were walking 
across the lawn towards the window; they all carried guns 
under their arms, and one of them was additionally 
burdened with a white coat hung over his shoulders.  A 
tired brown spaniel kept close at their heels.  
Noiselessly they neared the house, and then a hoarse 
young voice chanted out of the dusk: "I said, Bertie, why 
do you bound?"

Framton grabbed wildly at his stick and hat; the 
hall-door, the gravel-drive, and the front gate were 
dimly-noted stages in his headlong retreat.  A cyclist 
coming along the road had to run into the hedge to avoid 
an imminent collision.

"Here we are, my dear," said the bearer of the white 
mackintosh, coming in through the window; "fairly muddy, 
but most of it's dry.  Who was that who bolted out as we 
came up?"

"A most extraordinary man, a Mr. Nuttel," said Mrs. 
Sappleton; "could only talk about his illnesses, and 
dashed off without a word of good-bye or apology when you 
arrived.  One would think he had seen a ghost."

"I expect it was the spaniel," said the niece 
calmly; "he told me he had a horror of dogs.  He was once 
hunted into a cemetery somewhere on the banks of the 
Ganges by a pack of pariah dogs, and had to spend the 
night in a newly dug grave with the creatures snarling 
and grinning and foaming just above him.  Enough to make 
anyone their nerve."

Romance at short notice was her speciality.


THE TREASURE SHIP


THE great galleon lay in semi-retirement under the 
sand and weed and water of the northern bay where the 
fortune of war and weather had long ago ensconced it.  
Three and a quarter centuries had passed since the day 
when it had taken the high seas as an important unit of a 
fighting squadron - precisely which squadron the learned 
were not agreed.  The galleon had brought nothing into 
the world, but it had, according to tradition and report, 
taken much out of it.  But how much?  There again the 
learned were in disagreement.  Some were as generous in 
their estimate as an income-tax assessor, others applied 
a species of higher criticism to the submerged treasure 
chests, and debased their contents to the currency of 
goblin gold.  Of the former school was Lulu, Duchess of 
Dulverton.

The Duchess was not only a believer in the existence 
of a sunken treasure of alluring proportions; she also 
believed that she knew of a method by which the said 
treasure might be precisely located and cheaply 
disembedded.  An aunt on her mother's side of the family 
had been Maid of Honour at the Court of Monaco, and had 
taken a respectful interest in the deep-sea researches in 
which the Throne of that country, impatient perhaps of 
its terrestrial restrictions, was wont to immerse itself.  
It was through the instrumentality of this relative that 
the Duchess learned of an invention, perfected and very 
nearly patented by a Monegaskan savant, by means of which 
the home-life of the Mediterranean sardine might be 
studied at a depth of many fathoms in a cold white light 
of more than ball-room brilliancy.  Implicated in this 
invention (and, in the Duchess's eyes, the most 
attractive part of it) was an electric suction dredge, 
specially designed for dragging to the surface such 
objects of interest and value as might be found in the 
more accessible levels of the ocean-bed.  The rights of 
the invention were to be acquired for a matter of 
eighteen hundred francs, and the apparatus for a few 
thousand more.  The Duchess of Dulverton was rich, as the 
world counted wealth; she nursed the hope, of being one 
day rich at her own computation.  Companies had been 
formed and efforts had been made again and again during 
the course of three centuries to probe for the alleged 
treasures of the interesting galleon; with the aid of 
this invention she considered that she might go to work 
on the wreck privately and independently.  After all, one 
of her ancestors on her mother's side was descended from 
Medina Sidonia, so she was of opinion that she had as 
much right to the treasure as anyone.  She acquired the 
invention and bought the apparatus.

Among other family ties and encumbrances, Lulu 
possessed a nephew, Vasco Honiton, a young gentleman who 
was blessed with a small income and a large circle of 
relatives, and lived impartially and precariously on 
both.  The name Vasco had been given him possibly in the 
hope that he might live up to its adventurous tradition, 
but he limited himself strictly to the home industry of 
adventurer, preferring to exploit the assured rather than 
to explore the unknown.  Lulu's intercourse with him had 
been restricted of recent years to the negative processes 
of being out of town when he called on her, and short of 
money when he wrote to her.  Now, however, she bethought 
herself of his eminent suitability for the direction of a 
treasure-seeking experiment; if anyone could extract gold 
from an unpromising situation it would certainly be Vasco 
- of course, under the necessary safeguards in the way of 
supervision.  Where money was in question Vasco's 
conscience was liable to fits of obstinate silence.

Somewhere on the west coast of Ireland the Dulverton 
property included a few acres of shingle, rock, and 
heather, too barren to support even an agrarian outrage, 
but embracing a small and fairly deep bay where the 
lobster yield was good in most seasons.  There was a 
bleak little house on the property, and for those who 
liked lobsters and solitude, and were able to accept an 
Irish cook's ideas as to what might be perpetrated in the 
name of mayonnaise, Innisgluther was a tolerable exile 
during the summer months.  Lulu seldom went there 
herself, but she lent the house lavishly to friends and 
relations.  She put it now at Vasco's disposal.

"It will be the very place to practise and 
experiment with the salvage apparatus," she said; "the 
bay is quite deep in places, and you will be able to test 
everything thoroughly before starting on the treasure 
hunt."

In less than three weeks Vasco turned up in town to 
report progress.

"The apparatus works beautifully," he informed his 
aunt; "the deeper one got the clearer everything grew.  
We found something in the way of a sunken wreck to 
operate on, too!"

"A wreck in Innisgluther Bay!" exclaimed Lulu.

"A submerged motor-boat, the SUB-ROSA," said Vasco.

"No! really?" said Lulu; "poor Billy Yuttley's boat.  
I remember it went down somewhere off that coast some 
three years ago.  His body was washed ashore at the 
Point.  People said at the time that the boat was 
capsized intentionally - a case of suicide, you know.  
People always say that sort of thing when anything tragic 
happens."

"In this case they were right," said Vasco.

"What do you mean?" asked the Duchess hurriedly.  
"What makes you think so?"

"I know," said Vasco simply.

"Know?  How can you know?  How can anyone know?  The 
thing happened three years ago."

"In a locker of the SUB-ROSA I found a water-tight 
strong-box.  It contained papers."  Vasco paused with 
dramatic effect and searched for a moment in the inner 
breast-pocket of his coat.  He drew out a folded slip of 
paper.  The Duchess snatched at it in almost indecent 
haste and moved appreciably nearer the fireplace.

"Was this in the SUB-ROSA'S strong-box?" she asked.

"Oh no," said Vasco carelessly, "that is a list of 
the well-known people who would be involved in a very 
disagreeable scandal if the SUB-ROSA'S papers were made 
public.  I've put you at the head of it, otherwise it 
follows alphabetical order."

The Duchess gazed helplessly at the string of names, 
which seemed for the moment to include nearly every one 
she knew.  As a matter of fact, her own name at the head 
of the list exercised an almost paralysing effect on her 
thinking faculties.

"Of course you have destroyed the papers?" she 
asked, when she had somewhat recovered herself.  She was 
conscious that she made the remark with an entire lack of 
conviction.

Vasco shook his head.

"But you should have," said Lulu angrily; "if, as 
you say, they are highly compromising - "

"Oh, they are, I assure you of that," interposed the 
young man.

"Then you should put them out of harm's way at once.  
Supposing anything should leak out, think of all these 
poor, unfortunate people who would be involved in the 
disclosures," and Lulu tapped the list with an agitated 
gesture.

"Unfortunate, perhaps, but not poor," corrected 
Vasco; "if you read the list carefully you'll notice that 
I haven't troubled to include anyone whose financial 
standing isn't above question."

Lulu glared at her nephew for some moments in 
silence.  Then she asked hoarsely: "What are you going to 
do?"

"Nothing - for the remainder of my life," he 
answered meaningly.  "A little hunting, perhaps," he 
continued, "and I shall have a villa at Florence.  The 
Villa Sub-Rosa would sound rather quaint and picturesque, 
don't you think, and quite a lot of people would be able 
to attach a meaning to the name.  And I suppose I must 
have a hobby; I shall probably collect Raeburns."

Lulu's relative, who lived at the Court of Monaco, 
got quite a snappish answer when she wrote recommending 
some further invention in the realm of marine research.


THE COBWEB


THE farmhouse kitchen probably stood where it did as 
a matter of accident or haphazard choice; yet its 
situation might have been planned by a master-strategist 
in farmhouse architecture.  Dairy and poultry-yard, and 
herb garden, and all the busy places of the farm seemed 
to lead by easy access into its wide flagged haven, where 
there was room for everything and where muddy boots left 
traces that were easily swept away.  And yet, for all 
that it stood so well in the centre of human bustle, its 
long, latticed window, with the wide window-seat, built 
into an embrasure beyond the huge fireplace, looked out 
on a wild spreading view of hill and heather and wooded 
combe.  The window nook made almost a little room in 
itself, quite the pleasantest room in the farm as far as 
situation and capabilities went.  Young Mrs. Ladbruk, 
whose husband had just come into the farm by way of 
inheritance, cast covetous eyes on this snug corner, and 
her fingers itched to make it bright and cosy with chintz 
curtains and bowls of flowers, and a shelf or two of old 
china.  The musty farm parlour, looking out on to a prim, 
cheerless garden imprisoned within high, blank walls, was 
not a room that lent itself readily either to comfort or 
decoration.

"When we are more settled I shall work wonders in 
the way of making the kitchen habitable," said the young 
woman to her occasional visitors.  There was an unspoken 
wish in those words, a wish which was unconfessed as well 
as unspoken.  Emma Ladbruk was the mistress of the farm; 
jointly with her husband she might have her say, and to a 
certain extent her way, in ordering its affairs.  But she 
was not mistress of the kitchen.

On one of the shelves of an old dresser, in company 
with chipped sauce-boats, pewter jugs, cheese-graters, 
and paid bills, rested a worn and ragged Bible, on whose 
front page was the record, in faded ink, of a baptism 
dated ninety-four years ago. "Martha Crale" was the name 
written on that yellow page.  The yellow, wrinkled old 
dame who hobbled and muttered about the kitchen, looking 
like a dead autumn leaf which the winter winds still 
pushed hither and thither, had once been Martha Crale; 
for seventy odd years she had been Martha Mountjoy.  For 
longer than anyone could remember she had pattered to and 
fro between oven and wash-house and dairy, and out to 
chicken-run and garden, grumbling and muttering and 
scolding, but working unceasingly.  Emma Ladbruk, of 
whose coming she took as little notice as she would of a 
bee wandering in at a window on a summer's day, used at 
first to watch her with a kind of frightened curiosity.  
She was so old and so much a part of the place, it was 
difficult to think of her exactly as a living thing.  Old 
Shep, the white-nozzled, stiff-limbed collie, waiting for 
his time to die, seemed almost more human than the 
withered, dried-up old woman.  He had been a riotous, 
roystering puppy, mad with the joy of life, when she was 
already a tottering, hobbling dame; now he was just a 
blind, breathing carcase, nothing more, and she still 
worked with frail energy, still swept and baked and 
washed, fetched and carried.  If there were something in 
these wise old dogs that did not perish utterly with 
death, Emma used to think to herself, what generations of 
ghost-dogs there must be out on those hills, that Martha 
had reared and fed and tended and spoken a last goodbye 
word to in that old kitchen.  And what memories she must 
have of human generations that had passed away in her 
time.  It was difficult for anyone, let alone a stranger 
like Emma, to get her to talk of the days that had been; 
her shrill, quavering speech was of doors that had been 
left unfastened, pails that had got mislaid, calves whose 
feeding-time was overdue, and the various little faults 
and lapses that chequer a farmhouse routine.  Now and 
again, when election time came round, she would unstore 
her recollections of the old names round which the fight 
had waged in the days gone by.  There had been a 
Palmerston, that had been a name down Tiverton way; 
Tiverton was not a far journey as the crow flies, but to 
Martha it was almost a foreign country.  Later there had 
been Northcotes and Aclands, and many other newer names 
that she had forgotten; the names changed, but it was 
always Libruls and Toories, Yellows and Blues.  And they 
always quarrelled and shouted as to who was right and who 
was wrong.  The one they quarrelled about most was a fine 
old gentleman with an angry face - she had seen his 
picture on the walls.  She had seen it on the floor too, 
with a rotten apple squashed over it, for the farm had 
changed its politics from time to time.  Martha had never 
been on one side or the other; none of "they" had ever 
done the farm a stroke of good.  Such was her sweeping 
verdict, given with all a peasant's distrust of the 
outside world.

When the half-frightened curiosity had somewhat 
faded away, Emma Ladbruk was uncomfortably conscious of 
another feeling towards the old woman.  She was a quaint 
old tradition, lingering about the place, she was part 
and parcel of the farm itself, she was something at once 
pathetic and picturesque - but she was dreadfully in the 
way.  Emma had come to the farm full of plans for little 
reforms and improvements, in part the result of training 
in the newest ways and methods, in part the outcome of 
her own ideas and fancies.  Reforms in the kitchen 
region, if those deaf old ears could have been induced to 
give them even a hearing, would have met with short 
shrift and scornful rejection, and the kitchen region 
spread over the zone of dairy and market business and 
half the work of the household.  Emma, with the latest 
science of dead-poultry dressing at her finger-tips, sat 
by, an unheeded watcher, while old Martha trussed the 
chickens for the market-stall as she had trussed them for 
nearly four-score years - all leg and no breast.  And the 
hundred hints anent effective cleaning and labour-
lightening and the things that make for wholesomeness 
which the young woman was ready to impart or to put into 
action dropped away into nothingness before that wan, 
muttering, unheeding presence.  Above all, the coveted 
window corner, that was to be a dainty, cheerful oasis in 
the gaunt old kitchen, stood now choked and lumbered with 
a litter of odds and ends that Emma, for all her nominal 
authority, would not have dared or cared to displace; 
over them seemed to be spun the protection of something 
that was like a human cobweb.  Decidedly Martha was in 
the way.  It would have been an unworthy meanness to have 
wished to see the span of that brave old life shortened 
by a few paltry months, but as the days sped by Emma was 
conscious that the wish was there, disowned though it 
might be, lurking at the back of her mind.

She felt the meanness of the wish come over her with 
a qualm of self-reproach one day when she came into the 
kitchen and found an unaccustomed state of things in that 
usually busy quarter.  Old Martha was not working.  A 
basket of corn was on the floor by her side, and out in 
the yard the poultry were beginning to clamour a protest 
of overdue feeding-time.  But Martha sat huddled in a 
shrunken bunch on the window seat, looking out with her 
dim old eyes as though she saw something stranger than 
the autumn landscape.

"Is anything the matter, Martha?" asked the young 
woman.

"'Tis death, 'tis death a-coming," answered the 
quavering voice; "I knew 'twere coming.  I knew it.  
'Tweren't for nothing that old Shep's been howling all 
morning.  An' last night I heard the screech-owl give the 
death-cry, and there were something white as run across 
the yard yesterday; 'tweren't a cat nor a stoat, 'twere 
something.  The fowls knew 'twere something; they all 
drew off to one side.  Ay, there's been warnings.  I knew 
it were a-coming."

The young woman's eyes clouded with pity.  The old 
thing sitting there so white and shrunken had once been a 
merry, noisy child, playing about in lanes and hay-lofts 
and farmhouse garrets; that had been eighty odd years 
ago, and now she was just a frail old body cowering under 
the approaching chill of the death that was coming at 
last to take her.  It was not probable that much could be 
done for her, but Emma hastened away to get assistance 
and counsel.  Her husband, she knew, was down at a tree-
felling some little distance off, but she might find some 
other intelligent soul who knew the old woman better than 
she did.  The farm, she soon found out, had that faculty 
common to farmyards of swallowing up and losing its human 
population.  The poultry followed her in interested 
fashion, and swine grunted interrogations at her from 
behind the bars of their styes, but barnyard and 
rickyard, orchard and stables and dairy, gave no reward 
to her search.  Then, as she retraced her steps towards 
the kitchen, she came suddenly on her cousin, young Mr. 
Jim, as every one called him, who divided his time 
between amateur horse-dealing, rabbit-shooting, and 
flirting with the farm maids.

"I'm afraid old Martha is dying," said Emma.  Jim 
was not the sort of person to whom one had to break news 
gently.

"Nonsense," he said; "Martha means to live to a 
hundred.  She told me so, and she'll do it."

"She may be actually dying at this moment, or it may 
just be the beginning of the break-up," persisted Emma, 
with a feeling of contempt for the slowness and dulness 
of the young man.

A grin spread over his good-natured features.

"It don't look like it," he said, nodding towards 
the yard.  Emma turned to catch the meaning of his 
remark.  Old Martha stood in the middle of a mob of 
poultry scattering handfuls of grain around her.  The 
turkey-cock, with the bronzed sheen of his feathers and 
the purple-red of his wattles, the gamecock, with the 
glowing metallic lustre of his Eastern plumage, the hens, 
with their ochres and buffs and umbers and their scarlet 
combs, and the drakes, with their bottle-green heads, 
made a medley of rich colour, in the centre of which the 
old woman looked like a withered stalk standing amid a 
riotous growth of gaily-hued flowers.  But she threw the 
grain deftly amid the wilderness of beaks, and her 
quavering voice carried as far as the two people who were 
watching her.  She was still harping on the theme of 
death coming to the farm.

"I knew 'twere a-coming.  There's been signs an' 
warnings."

"Who's dead, then, old Mother?" called out the young 
man.

"'Tis young Mister Ladbruk," she shrilled back; 
"they've just a-carried his body in.  Run out of the way 
of a tree that was coming down an' ran hisself on to an 
iron post.  Dead when they picked un up.  Aye, I knew 
'twere coming."

And she turned to fling a handful of barley at a 
belated group of guinea-fowl that came racing toward her.

* * * *

The farm was a family property, and passed to the 
rabbit-shooting cousin as the next-of-kin.  Emma Ladbruk 
drifted out of its history as a bee that had wandered in 
at an open window might flit its way out again.  On a 
cold grey morning she stood waiting, with her boxes 
already stowed in the farm cart, till the last of the 
market produce should be ready, for the train she was to 
catch was of less importance than the chickens and butter 
and eggs that were to be offered for sale.  From where 
she stood she could see an angle of the long latticed 
window that was to have been cosy with curtains and gay 
with bowls of flowers.  Into her mind came the thought 
that for months, perhaps for years, long after she had 
been utterly forgotten, a white, unheeding face would be 
seen peering out through those latticed panes, and a weak 
muttering voice would be heard quavering up and down 
those flagged passages.  She made her way to a narrow 
barred casement that opened into the farm larder.  Old 
Martha was standing at a table trussing a pair of 
chickens for the market stall as she had trussed them for 
nearly fourscore years.


THE LULL


I'VE asked Latimer Springfield to spend Sunday with 
us and stop the night," announced Mrs. Durmot at the 
breakfast-table.

"I thought he was in the throes of an election," 
remarked her husband.

"Exactly; the poll is on Wednesday, and the poor man 
will have worked himself to a shadow by that time.  
Imagine what electioneering must be like in this awful 
soaking rain, going along slushy country roads and 
speaking to damp audiences in draughty schoolrooms, day 
after day for a fortnight.  He'll have to put in an 
appearance at some place of worship on Sunday morning, 
and he can come to us immediately afterwards and have a 
thorough respite from everything connected with politics.  
I won't let him even think of them.  I've had the picture 
of Cromwell dissolving the Long Parliament taken down 
from the staircase, and even the portrait of Lord 
Rosebery's 'Ladas' removed from the smoking-room.  And 
Vera," added Mrs. Durmot, turning to her sixteen-year-old 
niece, "be careful what colour ribbon you wear in your 
hair; not blue or yellow on any account; those are the 
rival party colours, and emerald green or orange would be 
almost as bad, with this Home Rule business to the fore."

"On state occasions I always wear a black ribbon in 
my hair," said Vera with crushing dignity.

Latimer Springfield was a rather cheerless, oldish 
young man, who went into politics somewhat in the spirit 
in which other people might go into half-mourning.  
Without being an enthusiast, however, he was a fairly 
strenuous plodder, and Mrs. Durmot had been reasonably 
near the mark in asserting that he was working at high 
pressure over this election.  The restful lull which his 
hostess enforced on him was decidedly welcome, and yet 
the nervous excitement of the contest had too great a 
hold on him to be totally banished.

"I know he's going to sit up half the night working 
up points for his final speeches," said Mrs. Durmot 
regretfully; "however, we've kept politics at arm's 
length all the afternoon and evening.  More than that we 
cannot do."

"That remains to be seen," said Vera, but she said 
it to herself.

Latimer had scarcely shut his bedroom door before he 
was immersed in a sheaf of notes and pamphlets, while a 
fountain-pen and pocket-book were brought into play for 
the due marshalling of useful facts and discreet 
fictions.  He had been at work for perhaps thirty-five 
minutes, and the house was seemingly consecrated to the 
healthy slumber of country life, when a stifled squealing 
and scuffling in the passage was followed by a loud tap 
at his door.  Before he had time to answer, a much-
encumbered Vera burst into the room with the question; "I 
say, can I leave these here?"

"These" were a small black pig and a lusty specimen 
of black-red gamecock.

Latimer was moderately fond of animals, and 
particularly interested in small livestock rearing from 
the economic point of view; in fact, one of the pamphlets 
on which he was at that moment engaged warmly advocated 
the further development of the pig and poultry industry 
in our rural districts; but he was pardonably unwilling 
to share even a commodious bedroom with samples of 
henroost and stye products.

"Wouldn't they be happier somewhere outside?" he 
asked, tactfully expressing his own preference in the 
matter in an apparent solicitude for theirs.

"There is no outside," said Vera impressively, 
"nothing but a waste of dark, swirling waters.  The 
reservoir at Brinkley has burst."

"I didn't know there was a reservoir at Brinkley," 
said Latimer.

"Well, there isn't now, it's jolly well all over the 
place, and as we stand particularly low we're the centre 
of an inland sea just at present.  You see the river has 
overflowed its banks as well."

"Good gracious!  Have any lives been lost?"

"Heaps, I should say.  The second housemaid has 
already identified three bodies that have floated past 
the billiard-room window as being the young man she's 
engaged to.  Either she's engaged to a large assortment 
of the population round here or else she's very careless 
at identification.  Of course it may be the same body 
coming round again and again in a swirl; I hadn't thought 
of that."

"But we ought to go out and do rescue work, oughtn't 
we?" said Latimer, with the instinct of a Parliamentary 
candidate for getting into the local limelight.

"We can't," said Vera decidedly, "we haven't any 
boats and we're cut off by a raging torrent from any 
human habitation.  My aunt particularly hoped you would 
keep to your room and not add to the confusion, but she 
thought it would be so kind of you if you would take in 
Hartlepool's Wonder, the gamecock, you know, for the 
night.  You see, there are eight other gamecocks, and 
they fight like furies if they get together, so we're 
putting one in each bedroom.  The fowl-houses are all 
flooded out, you know.  And then I thought perhaps you 
wouldn't mind taking in this wee piggie; he's rather a 
little love, but he has a vile temper.  He gets that from 
his mother - not that I like to say things against her 
when she's lying dead and drowned in her stye, poor 
thing.  What he really wants is a man's firm hand to keep 
him in order.  I'd try and grapple with him myself, only 
I've got my chow in my room, you know, and he goes for 
pigs wherever he finds them."

"Couldn't the pig go in the bathroom?" asked Latimer 
faintly, wishing that he had taken up as determined a 
stand on the subject of bedroom swine as the chow had.

"The bathroom?" Vera laughed shrilly.  "It'll be 
full of Boy Scouts till morning if the hot water holds 
out."

"Boy Scouts?"

"Yes, thirty of them came to rescue us while the 
water was only waist-high; then it rose another three 
feet or so and we had to rescue them.  We're giving them 
hot baths in batches and drying their clothes in the hot-
air cupboard, but, of course, drenched clothes don't dry 
in a minute, and the corridor and staircase are beginning 
to look like a bit of coast scenery by Tuke.  Two of the 
boys are wearing your Melton overcoat; I hope you don't 
mind."

"It's a new overcoat," said Latimer, with every 
indication of minding dreadfully.

"You'll take every care of Hartlepool's Wonder, 
won't you?" said Vera.  "His mother took three firsts at 
Birmingham, and he was second in the cockerel class last 
year at Gloucester.  He'll probably roost on the rail at 
the bottom of your bed.  I wonder if he'd feel more at 
home if some of his wives were up here with him?  The 
hens are all in the pantry, and I think I could pick out 
Hartlepool Helen; she's his favourite."

Latimer showed a belated firmness on the subject of 
Hartlepool Helen, and Vera withdrew without pressing the 
point, having first settled the gamecock on his 
extemporised perch and taken an affectionate farewell of 
the pigling.  Latimer undressed and got into bed with all 
due speed, judging that the pig would abate its 
inquisitorial restlessness once the light was turned out.  
As a substitute for a cosy, straw-bedded sty the room 
offered, at first inspection, few attractions, but the 
disconsolate animal suddenly discovered an appliance in 
which the most luxuriously contrived piggeries were 
notably deficient.  The sharp edge of the underneath part 
of the bed was pitched at exactly the right elevation to 
permit the pigling to scrape himself ecstatically 
backwards and forwards, with an artistic humping of the 
back at the crucial moment and an accompanying gurgle of 
long-drawn delight.  The gamecock, who may have fancied 
that he was being rocked in the branches of a pine-tree, 
bore the motion with greater fortitude than Latimer was 
able to command.  A series of slaps directed at the pig's 
body were accepted more as an additional and pleasing 
irritant than as a criticism of conduct or a hint to 
desist; evidently something more than a man's firm hand 
was needed to deal with the case.  Latimer slipped out of 
bed in search of a weapon of dissuasion.  There was 
sufficient light in the room to enable the pig to detect 
this manoeuvre, and the vile temper, inherited from the 
drowned mother, found full play.  Latimer bounded back 
into bed, and his conqueror, after a few threatening 
snorts and champings of its jaws, resumed its massage 
operations with renewed zeal.  During the long wakeful 
hours which ensued Latimer tried to distract his mind 
from his own immediate troubles by dwelling with decent 
sympathy on the second housemaid's bereavement, but he 
found himself more often wondering how many Boy Scouts 
were sharing his Melton overcoat.  The role of Saint 
Martin malgre lui was not one which appealed to him.

Towards dawn the pigling fell into a happy slumber, 
and Latimer might have followed its example, but at about 
the same time Stupor Hartlepooli gave a rousing crow, 
clattered down to the floor and forthwith commenced a 
spirited combat with his reflection in the wardrobe 
mirror.  Remembering that the bird was more or less under 
his care Latimer performed Hague Tribunal offices by 
draping a bath-towel over the provocative mirror, but the 
ensuing peace was local and short-lived.  The deflected 
energies of the gamecock found new outlet in a sudden and 
sustained attack on the sleeping and temporarily 
inoffensive pigling, and the duel which followed was 
desperate and embittered beyond any possibility of 
effective intervention.  The feathered combatant had the 
advantage of being able, when hard pressed, to take 
refuge on the bed, and freely availed himself of this 
circumstance; the pigling never quite succeeded in 
hurling himself on to the same eminence, but it was not 
from want of trying.

Neither side could claim any decisive success, and 
the struggle had been practically fought to a standstill 
by the time that the maid appeared with the early morning 
tea.

 "Lor, sir," she exclaimed in undisguised 
astonishment, "do you want those animals in your room?"

WANT!

The pigling, as though aware that it might have 
outstayed its welcome, dashed out at the door, and the 
gamecock followed it at a more dignified pace.

"If Miss Vera's dog sees that pig - !" exclaimed the 
maid, and hurried off to avert such a catastrophe.

A cold suspicion was stealing over Latimer's mind; 
he went to the window and drew up the blind.  A light, 
drizzling rain was falling, but there was not the 
faintest trace of any inundation.

Some half-hour later he met Vera on the way to the 
breakfast-room.

"I should not like to think of you as a deliberate 
liar," he observed coldly, "but one occasionally has to 
do things one does not like."

"At any rate I kept your mind from dwelling on 
politics all the night," said Vera.

Which was, of course, perfectly true.


THE UNKINDEST BLOW


THE season of strikes seemed to have run itself to a 
standstill.  Almost every trade and industry and calling 
in which a dislocation could possibly be engineered had 
indulged in that luxury.  The last and least successful 
convulsion had been the strike of the World's Union of 
Zoological Garden attendants, who, pending the settlement 
of certain demands, refused to minister further to the 
wants of the animals committed to their charge or to 
allow any other keepers to take their place.  In this 
case the threat of the Zoological Gardens authorities 
that if the men "came out" the animals should come out 
also had intensified and precipitated the crisis.  The 
imminent prospect of the larger carnivores, to say 
nothing of rhinoceroses and bull bison, roaming at large 
and unfed in the heart of London, was not one which 
permitted of prolonged conferences.  The Government of 
the day, which from its tendency to be a few hours behind 
the course of events had been nicknamed the Government of 
the afternoon, was obliged to intervene with promptitude 
and decision.  A strong force of Bluejackets was 
despatched to Regent's Park to take over the temporarily 
abandoned duties of the strikers.  Bluejackets were 
chosen in preference to land forces, partly on account of 
the traditional readiness of the British Navy to go 
anywhere and do anything, partly by reason of the 
familiarity of the average sailor with monkeys, parrots, 
and other tropical fauna, but chiefly at the urgent 
request of the First Lord of the Admiralty, who was 
keenly desirous of an opportunity for performing some 
personal act of unobtrusive public service within the 
province of his department.

"If he insists on feeding the infant jaguar himself, 
in defiance of its mother's wishes, there may be another 
by-election in the north," said one of his colleagues, 
with a hopeful inflection in his voice.  "By-elections 
are not very desirable at present, but we must not be 
selfish."

As a matter of fact the strike collapsed peacefully 
without any outside intervention.  The majority of the 
keepers had become so attached to their charges that they 
returned to work of their own accord.

And then the nation and the newspapers turned with a 
sense of relief to happier things.  It seemed as if a new 
era of contentment was about to dawn.  Everybody had 
struck who could possibly want to strike or who could 
possibly be cajoled or bullied into striking, whether 
they wanted to or not.  The lighter and brighter side of 
life might now claim some attention.  And conspicuous 
among the other topics that sprang into sudden prominence 
was the pending Falvertoon divorce suit.

The Duke of Falvertoon was one of those human HORS 
D'OEUVRES that stimulate the public appetite for 
sensation without giving it much to feed on.  As a mere 
child he had been precociously brilliant; he had declined 
the editorship of the ANGLIAN REVIEW at an age when most 
boys are content to have declined MENSA, a table, and 
though he could not claim to have originated the Futurist 
movement in literature, his "Letters to a possible 
Grandson," written at the age of fourteen, had attracted 
considerable notice.  In later days his brilliancy had 
been less conspicuously displayed.  During a debate in 
the House of Lords on affairs in Morocco, at a moment 
when that country, for the fifth time in seven years, had 
brought half Europe to the verge of war, he had 
interpolated the remark "a little Moor and how much it 
is," but in spite of the encouraging reception accorded 
to this one political utterance he was never tempted to a 
further display in that direction.  It began to be 
generally understood that he did not intend to supplement 
his numerous town and country residences by living 
overmuch in the public eye.

And then had come the unlooked-for tidings of the 
imminent proceedings for divorce.  And such a divorce!  
There were cross-suits and allegations and counter-
allegations, charges of cruelty and desertion, everything 
in fact that was necessary to make the case one of the 
most complicated and sensational of its kind.  And the 
number of distinguished people involved or cited as 
witnesses not only embraced both political parties in the 
realm and several Colonial governors, but included an 
exotic contingent from France, Hungary, the United States 
of North America, and the Grand Duchy of Baden.  Hotel 
accommodation of the more expensive sort began to 
experience a strain on its resources.  "It will be quite 
like the Durbar without the elephants," exclaimed an 
enthusiastic lady who, to do her justice, had never seen 
a Durbar.  The general feeling was one of thankfulness 
that the last of the strikes had been got over before the 
date fixed for the hearing of the great suit.

As a reaction from the season of gloom and 
industrial strife that had just passed away the agencies 
that purvey and stage-manage sensations laid themselves 
out to do their level best on this momentous occasion.  
Men who had made their reputations as special descriptive 
writers were mobilised from distant corners of Europe and 
the further side of the Atlantic in order to enrich with 
their pens the daily printed records of the case; one 
word-painter, who specialised in descriptions of how 
witnesses turn pale under cross-examination, was summoned 
hurriedly back from a famous and prolonged murder trial 
in Sicily, where indeed his talents were being decidedly 
wasted.  Thumb-nail artists and expert kodak manipulators 
were retained at extravagant salaries, and special dress 
reporters were in high demand.  An enterprising Paris 
firm of costume builders presented the defendant Duchess 
with three special creations, to be worn, marked, 
learned, and extensively reported at various critical 
stages of the trial; and as for the cinematograph agents, 
their industry and persistence was untiring.  Films 
representing the Duke saying good-bye to his favourite 
canary on the eve of the trial were in readiness weeks 
before the event was due to take place; other films 
depicted the Duchess holding imaginary consultations with 
fictitious lawyers or making a light repast off specially 
advertised vegetarian sandwiches during a supposed 
luncheon interval.  As far as human foresight and human 
enterprise could go nothing was lacking to make the trial 
a success.

Two days before the case was down for hearing the 
advance reporter of an important syndicate obtained an 
interview with the Duke for the purpose of gleaning some 
final grains of information concerning his Grace's 
personal arrangements during the trial.

"I suppose I may say this will be one of the biggest 
affairs of its kind during the lifetime of a generation," 
began the reporter as an excuse for the unsparing 
minuteness of detail that he was about to make quest for.

"I suppose so - if it comes off," said the Duke 
lazily.

"If?" queried the reporter, in a voice that was 
something between a gasp and a scream.

"The Duchess and I are both thinking of going on 
strike," said the Duke.

"Strike!"

The baleful word flashed out in all its old hideous 
familiarity.  Was there to be no end to its recurrence?

"Do you mean," faltered the reporter, "that you are 
contemplating a mutual withdrawal of the charges?"

"Precisely," said the Duke.

"But think of the arrangements that have been made, 
the special reporting, the cinematographs, the catering 
for the distinguished foreign witnesses, the prepared 
music-hall allusions; think of all the money that has 
been sunk - "

"Exactly," said the Duke coldly, "the Duchess and I 
have realised that it is we who provide the material out 
of which this great far-reaching industry has been built 
up.  Widespread employment will be given and enormous 
profits made during the duration of the case, and we, on 
whom all the stress and racket falls, will get - what?  
An unenviable notoriety and the privilege of paying heavy 
legal expenses whichever way the verdict goes.  Hence our 
decision to strike.  We don't wish to be reconciled; we 
fully realise that it is a grave step to take, but unless 
we get some reasonable consideration out of this vast 
stream of wealth and industry that we have called into 
being we intend coming out of court and staying out.  
Good afternoon."

The news of this latest strike spread universal 
dismay.  Its inaccessibility to the ordinary methods of 
persuasion made it peculiarly formidable.  If the Duke 
and Duchess persisted in being reconciled the Government 
could hardly be called on to interfere.  Public opinion 
in the shape of social ostracism might be brought to bear 
on them, but that was as far as coercive measures could 
go.  There was nothing for it but a conference, with 
powers to propose liberal terms.  As it was, several of 
the foreign witnesses had already departed and others had 
telegraphed cancelling their hotel arrangements.

The conference, protracted, uncomfortable, and 
occasionally acrimonious, succeeded at last in arranging 
for a resumption of litigation, but it was a fruitless 
victory.  The Duke, with a touch of his earlier 
precocity, died of premature decay a fortnight before the 
date fixed for the new trial.


THE ROMANCERS


IT was autumn in London, that blessed season between 
the harshness of winter and the insincerities of summer; 
a trustful season when one buys bulbs and sees to the 
registration of one's vote, believing perpetually in 
spring and a change of Government.

Morton Crosby sat on a bench in a secluded corner of 
Hyde Park, lazily enjoying a cigarette and watching the 
slow grazing promenade of a pair of snow-geese, the male 
looking rather like an albino edition of the russet-hued 
female.  Out of the corner of his eye Crosby also noted 
with some interest the hesitating hoverings of a human 
figure, which had passed and repassed his seat two or 
three times at shortening intervals, like a wary crow 
about to alight near some possibly edible morsel.  
Inevitably the figure came to an anchorage on the bench, 
within easy talking distance of its original occupant.  
The uncared-for clothes, the aggressive, grizzled beard, 
and the furtive, evasive eye of the new-comer bespoke the 
professional cadger, the man who would undergo hours of 
humiliating tale-spinning and rebuff rather than 
adventure on half a day's decent work.

For a while the new-comer fixed his eyes straight in 
front of him in a strenuous, unseeing gaze; then his 
voice broke out with the insinuating inflection of one 
who has a story to retail well worth any loiterer's while 
to listen to.

"It's a strange world," he said.

As the statement met with no response he altered it 
to the form of a question.

"I daresay you've found it to be a strange world, 
mister?"

"As far as I am concerned," said Crosby, "the 
strangeness has worn off in the course of thirty-six 
years."

"Ah," said the greybeard, "I could tell you things 
that you'd hardly believe.  Marvellous things that have 
really happened to me."

"Nowadays there is no demand for marvellous things 
that have really happened," said Crosby discouragingly; 
"the professional writers of fiction turn these things 
out so much better.  For instance, my neighbours tell me 
wonderful, incredible things that their Aberdeens and 
chows and borzois have done; I never listen to them.  On 
the other hand, I have read 'The Hound of the 
Baskervilles' three times."

The greybeard moved uneasily in his seat; then he 
opened up new country.

"I take it that you are a professing Christian," he 
observed.

"I am a prominent and I think I may say an 
influential member of the Mussulman community of Eastern 
Persia," said Crosby, making an excursion himself into 
the realms of fiction.

The greybeard was obviously disconcerted at this new 
check to introductory conversation, but the defeat was 
only momentary.

"Persia.  I should never have taken you for a 
Persian," he remarked, with a somewhat aggrieved air.

"I am not," said Crosby; "my father was an Afghan."

"An Afghan!" said the other, smitten into bewildered 
silence for a moment.  Then he recovered himself and 
renewed his attack.

"Afghanistan.  Ah!  We've had some wars with that 
country; now, I daresay, instead of fighting it we might 
have learned something from it.  A very wealthy country, 
I believe.  No real poverty there."

He raised his voice on the word "poverty" with a 
suggestion of intense feeling.  Crosby saw the opening 
and avoided it.

"It possesses, nevertheless, a number of highly 
talented and ingenious beggars," he said; "if I had not 
spoken so disparagingly of marvellous things that have 
really happened I would tell you the story of Ibrahim and 
the eleven camel-loads of blotting-paper.  Also I have 
forgotten exactly how it ended."

"My own life-story is a curious one," said the 
stranger, apparently stifling all desire to hear the 
history of Ibrahim; "I was not always as you see me now."

"We are supposed to undergo complete change in the 
course of every seven years," said Crosby, as an 
explanation of the foregoing announcement.

"I mean I was not always in such distressing 
circumstances as I am at present," pursued the stranger 
doggedly.

"That sounds rather rude," said Crosby stiffly, 
"considering that you are at present talking to a man 
reputed to be one of the most gifted conversationalists 
of the Afghan border."

"I don't mean in that way," said the greybeard 
hastily; "I've been very much interested in your 
conversation.  I was alluding to my unfortunate financial 
situation.  You mayn't hardly believe it, but at the 
present moment I am absolutely without a farthing.  Don't 
see any prospect of getting any money, either, for the 
next few days.  I don't suppose you've ever found 
yourself in such a position," he added.

"In the town of Yom," said Crosby, "which is in 
Southern Afghanistan, and which also happens to be my 
birthplace, there was a Chinese philosopher who used to 
say that one of the three chiefest human blessings was to 
be absolutely without money.  I forget what the other two 
were."

"Ah, I daresay," said the stranger, in a tone that 
betrayed no enthusiasm for the philosopher's memory; "and 
did he practise what he preached?  That's the test."

"He lived happily with very little money or 
resources," said Crosby.

"Then I expect he had friends who would help him 
liberally whenever he was in difficulties, such as I am 
in at present."

"In Yom," said Crosby, "it is not necessary to have 
friends in order to obtain help.  Any citizen of Yom 
would help a stranger as a matter of course."

The greybeard was now genuinely interested.

The conversation had at last taken a favourable 
turn.

"If someone, like me, for instance, who was in 
undeserved difficulties, asked a citizen of that town you 
speak of for a small loan to tide over a few days' 
impecuniosity - five shillings, or perhaps a rather 
larger sum - would it be given to him as a matter of 
course?"

"There would be a certain preliminary," said Crosby; 
"one would take him to a wine-shop and treat him to a 
measure of wine, and then, after a little high-flown 
conversation, one would put the desired sum in his hand 
and wish him good-day.  It is a roundabout way of 
performing a simple transaction, but in the East all ways 
are roundabout."

The listener's eyes were glittering.

"Ah," he exclaimed, with a thin sneer ringing 
meaningly through his words, "I suppose you've given up 
all those generous customs since you left your town.  
Don't practise them now, I expect."

"No one who has lived in Yom," said Crosby 
fervently, "and remembers its green hills covered with 
apricot and almond trees, and the cold water that rushes 
down like a caress from the upland snows and dashes under 
the little wooden bridges, no one who remembers these 
things and treasures the memory of them would ever give 
up a single one of its unwritten laws and customs.  To me 
they are as binding as though I still lived in that 
hallowed home of my youth."

"Then if I was to ask you for a small loan - " began 
the greybeard fawningly, edging nearer on the seat and 
hurriedly wondering how large he might safely make his 
request, "if I was to ask you for, say - "

"At any other time, certainly," said Crosby; "in the 
months of November and December, however, it is 
absolutely forbidden for anyone of our race to give or 
receive loans or gifts; in fact, one does not willingly 
speak of them.  It is considered unlucky.  We will 
therefore close this discussion."

"But it is still October!" exclaimed the adventurer 
with an eager, angry whine, as Crosby rose from his seat; 
"wants eight days to the end of the month!"

"The Afghan November began yesterday," said Crosby 
severely, and in another moment he was striding across 
the Park, leaving his recent companion scowling and 
muttering furiously on the seat.

"I don't believe a word of his story," he chattered 
to himself; "pack of nasty lies from beginning to end.  
Wish I'd told him so to his face.  Calling himself an 
Afghan!"

The snorts and snarls that escaped from him for the 
next quarter of an hour went far to support the truth of 
the old saying that two of a trade never agree.


THE SCHARTZ-METTERKLUME METHOD


LADY CARLOTTA stepped out on to the platform of the 
small wayside station and took a turn or two up and down 
its uninteresting length, to kill time till the train 
should be pleased to proceed on its way.  Then, in the 
roadway beyond, she saw a horse struggling with a more 
than ample load, and a carter of the sort that seems to 
bear a sullen hatred against the animal that helps him to 
earn a living.  Lady Carlotta promptly betook her to the 
roadway, and put rather a different complexion on the 
struggle.  Certain of her acquaintances were wont to give 
her plentiful admonition as to the undesirability of 
interfering on behalf of a distressed animal, such 
interference being "none of her business."  Only once had 
she put the doctrine of non-interference into practice, 
when one of its most eloquent exponents had been besieged 
for nearly three hours in a small and extremely 
uncomfortable may-tree by an angry boar-pig, while Lady 
Carlotta, on the other side of the fence, had proceeded 
with the water-colour sketch she was engaged on, and 
refused to interfere between the boar and his prisoner.  
It is to be feared that she lost the friendship of the 
ultimately rescued lady.  On this occasion she merely 
lost the train, which gave way to the first sign of 
impatience it had shown throughout the journey, and 
steamed off without her.  She bore the desertion with 
philosophical indifference; her friends and relations 
were thoroughly well used to the fact of her luggage 
arriving without her.  She wired a vague non-committal 
message to her destination to say that she was coming on 
"by another train."  Before she had time to think what 
her next move might be she was confronted by an 
imposingly attired lady, who seemed to be taking a 
prolonged mental inventory of her clothes and looks.

"You must be Miss Hope, the governess I've come to 
meet," said the apparition, in a tone that admitted of 
very little argument.

"Very well, if I must I must," said Lady Carlotta to 
herself with dangerous meekness.

"I am Mrs. Quabarl," continued the lady; "and where, 
pray, is your luggage?"

"It's gone astray," said the alleged governess, 
falling in with the excellent rule of life that the 
absent are always to blame; the luggage had, in point of 
fact, behaved with perfect correctitude.  "I've just 
telegraphed about it," she added, with a nearer approach 
to truth.

"How provoking," said Mrs. Quabarl; "these railway 
companies are so careless.  However, my maid can lend you 
things for the night," and she led the way to her car.

During the drive to the Quabarl mansion Lady 
Carlotta was impressively introduced to the nature of the 
charge that had been thrust upon her; she learned that 
Claude and Wilfrid were delicate, sensitive young people, 
that Irene had the artistic temperament highly developed, 
and that Viola was something or other else of a mould 
equally commonplace among children of that class and type 
in the twentieth century.

"I wish them not only to be TAUGHT," said Mrs. 
Quabarl, "but INTERESTED in what they learn.  In their 
history lessons, for instance, you must try to make them 
feel that they are being introduced to the life-stories 
of men and women who really lived, not merely committing 
a mass of names and dates to memory.  French, of course, 
I shall expect you to talk at meal-times several days in 
the week."

"I shall talk French four days of the week and 
Russian in the remaining three."

"Russian?  My dear Miss Hope, no one in the house 
speaks or understands Russian."

"That will not embarrass me in the least," said Lady 
Carlotta coldly.

Mrs. Quabarl, to use a colloquial expression, was 
knocked off her perch.  She was one of those imperfectly 
self-assured individuals who are magnificent and 
autocratic as long as they are not seriously opposed.  
The least show of unexpected resistance goes a long way 
towards rendering them cowed and apologetic.  When the 
new governess failed to express wondering admiration of 
the large newly-purchased and expensive car, and lightly 
alluded to the superior advantages of one or two makes 
which had just been put on the market, the discomfiture 
of her patroness became almost abject.  Her feelings were 
those which might have animated a general of ancient 
warfaring days, on beholding his heaviest battle-elephant 
ignominiously driven off the field by slingers and 
javelin throwers.

At dinner that evening, although reinforced by her 
husband, who usually duplicated her opinions and lent her 
moral support generally, Mrs. Quabarl regained none of 
her lost ground.  The governess not only helped herself 
well and truly to wine, but held forth with considerable 
show of critical knowledge on various vintage matters, 
concerning which the Quabarls were in no wise able to 
pose as authorities.  Previous governesses had limited 
their conversation on the wine topic to a respectful and 
doubtless sincere expression of a preference for water.  
When this one went as far as to recommend a wine firm in 
whose hands you could not go very far wrong Mrs. Quabarl 
thought it time to turn the conversation into more usual 
channels.

"We got very satisfactory references about you from 
Canon Teep," she observed; "a very estimable man, I 
should think."

"Drinks like a fish and beats his wife, otherwise a 
very lovable character," said the governess 
imperturbably.

"MY DEAR Miss Hope!  I trust you are exaggerating," 
exclaimed the Quabarls in unison.

"One must in justice admit that there is some 
provocation," continued the romancer.  "Mrs. Teep is 
quite the most irritating bridge-player that I have ever 
sat down with; her leads and declarations would condone a 
certain amount of brutality in her partner, but to souse 
her with the contents of the only soda-water syphon in 
the house on a Sunday afternoon, when one couldn't get 
another, argues an indifference to the comfort of others 
which I cannot altogether overlook.  You may think me 
hasty in my judgments, but it was practically on account 
of the syphon incident that I left."

"We will talk of this some other time," said Mrs. 
Quabarl hastily.

"I shall never allude to it again," said the 
governess with decision.

Mr. Quabarl made a welcome diversion by asking what 
studies the new instructress proposed to inaugurate on 
the morrow.

"History to begin with," she informed him.

"Ah, history," he observed sagely; "now in teaching 
them history you must take care to interest them in what 
they learn.  You must make them feel that they are being 
introduced to the life-stories of men and women who 
really lived - "

"I've told her all that," interposed Mrs. Quabarl.

"I teach history on the Schartz-Metterklume method," 
said the governess loftily.

"Ah, yes," said her listeners, thinking it expedient 
to assume an acquaintance at least with the name.


* * * *


"What are you children doing out here?" demanded 
Mrs. Quabarl the next morning, on finding Irene sitting 
rather glumly at the head of the stairs, while her sister 
was perched in an attitude of depressed discomfort on the 
window-seat behind her, with a wolf-skin rug almost 
covering her.

"We are having a history lesson," came the 
unexpected reply.  "I am supposed to be Rome, and Viola 
up there is the she-wolf; not a real wolf, but the figure 
of one that the Romans used to set store by - I forget 
why.  Claude and Wilfrid have gone to fetch the shabby 
women."

"The shabby women?"

"Yes, they've got to carry them off.  They didn't 
want to, but Miss Hope got one of father's fives-bats and 
said she'd give them a number nine spanking if they 
didn't, so they've gone to do it."

A loud, angry screaming from the direction of the 
lawn drew Mrs. Quabarl thither in hot haste, fearful lest 
the threatened castigation might even now be in process 
of infliction.  The outcry, however, came principally 
from the two small daughters of the lodge-keeper, who 
were being hauled and pushed towards the house by the 
panting and dishevelled Claude and Wilfrid, whose task 
was rendered even more arduous by the incessant, if not 
very effectual, attacks of the captured maidens' small 
brother.  The governess, fives-bat in hand, sat 
negligently on the stone balustrade, presiding over the 
scene with the cold impartiality of a Goddess of Battles.  
A furious and repeated chorus of "I'll tell muvver" rose 
from the lodge-children, but the lodge-mother, who was 
hard of hearing, was for the moment immersed in the 
preoccupation of her washtub.

After an apprehensive glance in the direction of the 
lodge (the good woman was gifted with the highly militant 
temper which is sometimes the privilege of deafness) Mrs. 
Quabarl flew indignantly to the rescue of the struggling 
captives.

"Wilfrid!  Claude!  Let those children go at once.  
Miss Hope, what on earth is the meaning of this scene?"

"Early Roman history; the Sabine Women, don't you 
know?  It's the Schartz-Metterklume method to make 
children understand history by acting it themselves; 
fixes it in their memory, you know.  Of course, if, 
thanks to your interference, your boys go through life 
thinking that the Sabine women ultimately escaped, I 
really cannot be held responsible."

"You may be very clever and modern, Miss Hope," said 
Mrs. Quabarl firmly, "but I should like you to leave here 
by the next train.  Your luggage will be sent after you 
as soon as it arrives."

"I'm not certain exactly where I shall be for the 
next few days," said the dismissed instructress of youth; 
"you might keep my luggage till I wire my address.  There 
are only a couple of trunks and some golf-clubs and a 
leopard cub."

"A leopard cub!" gasped Mrs. Quabarl.  Even in her 
departure this extraordinary person seemed destined to 
leave a trail of embarrassment behind her.

"Well, it's rather left off being a cub; it's more 
than half-grown, you know.  A fowl every day and a rabbit 
on Sundays is what it usually gets.  Raw beef makes it 
too excitable.  Don't trouble about getting the car for 
me, I'm rather inclined for a walk."

And Lady Carlotta strode out of the Quabarl horizon.

The advent of the genuine Miss Hope, who had made a 
mistake as to the day on which she was due to arrive, 
caused a turmoil which that good lady was quite unused to 
inspiring.  Obviously the Quabarl family had been 
woefully befooled, but a certain amount of relief came 
with the knowledge.

"How tiresome for you, dear Carlotta," said her 
hostess, when the overdue guest ultimately arrived; "how 
very tiresome losing your train and having to stop 
overnight in a strange place."

"Oh dear, no," said Lady Carlotta; "not at all 
tiresome - for me."


THE SEVENTH PULLET


"IT'S not the daily grind that I complain of," said 
Blenkinthrope resentfully; "it's the dull grey sameness 
of my life outside of office hours.  Nothing of interest 
comes my way, nothing remarkable or out of the common.  
Even the little things that I do try to find some 
interest in don't seem to interest other people.  Things 
in my garden, for instance."

"The potato that weighed just over two pounds," said 
his friend Gorworth.

"Did I tell you about that?" said Blenkinthrope; "I 
was telling the others in the train this morning.  I 
forgot if I'd told you."

"To be exact you told me that it weighed just under 
two pounds, but I took into account the fact that 
abnormal vegetables and freshwater fish have an after-
life, in which growth is not arrested."

"You're just like the others," said Blenkinthrope 
sadly, "you only make fun of it."

"The fault is with the potato, not with us," said 
Gorworth; "we are not in the least interested in it 
because it is not in the least interesting.  The men you 
go up in the train with every day are just in the same 
case as yourself; their lives are commonplace and not 
very interesting to themselves, and they certainly are 
not going to wax enthusiastic over the commonplace events 
in other men's lives.  Tell them something startling, 
dramatic, piquant that has happened to yourself or to 
someone in your family, and you will capture their 
interest at once.  They will talk about you with a 
certain personal pride to all their acquaintances.  'Man 
I know intimately, fellow called Blenkinthrope, lives 
down my way, had two of his fingers clawed clean off by a 
lobster he was carrying home to supper.  Doctor says 
entire hand may have to come off.'  Now that is 
conversation of a very high order.  But imagine walking 
into a tennis club with the remark: 'I know a man who has 
grown a potato weighing two and a quarter pounds.'"

"But hang it all, my dear fellow," said 
Blenkinthrope impatiently, "haven't I just told you that 
nothing of a remarkable nature ever happens to me?"

"Invent something," said Gorworth.  Since winning a 
prize for excellence in Scriptural knowledge at a 
preparatory school he had felt licensed to be a little 
more unscrupulous than the circle he moved in.  Much 
might surely be excused to one who in early life could 
give a list of seventeen trees mentioned in the Old 
Testament.

"What sort of thing?"asked Blenkinthrope, somewhat 
snappishly.

"A snake got into your hen-run yesterday morning and 
killed six out of seven pullets, first mesmerising them 
with its eyes and then biting them as they stood 
helpless.  The seventh pullet was one of that French 
sort, with feathers all over its eyes, so it escaped the 
mesmeric snare, and just flew at what it could see of the 
snake and pecked it to pieces."

"Thank you," said Blenkinthrope stiffly; "it's a 
very clever invention.  If such a thing had really 
happened in my poultry-run I admit I should have been 
proud and interested to tell people about it.  But I'd 
rather stick to fact, even if it is plain fact."  All the 
same his mind dwelt wistfully on the story of the Seventh 
Pullet.  He could picture himself telling it in the train 
amid the absorbed interest of his fellow-passengers.  
Unconsciously all sorts of little details and 
improvements began to suggest themselves.

Wistfulness was still his dominant mood when he took 
his seat in the railway carriage the next morning.  
Opposite him sat Stevenham, who had attained to a 
recognised brevet of importance through the fact of an 
uncle having dropped dead in the act of voting at a 
Parliamentary election.  That had happened three years 
ago, but Stevenham was still deferred to on all questions 
of home and foreign politics.

"Hullo, how's the giant mushroom, or whatever it 
was?" was all the notice Blenkinthrope got from his 
fellow travellers.

Young Duckby, whom he mildly disliked, speedily 
monopolised the general attention by an account of a 
domestic bereavement.

"Had four young pigeons carried off last night by a 
whacking big rat.  Oh, a monster he must have been; you 
could tell by the size of the hole he made breaking into 
the loft."

No moderate-sized rat ever seemed to carry out any 
predatory operations in these regions; they were all 
enormous in their enormity.

"Pretty hard lines that," continued Duckby, seeing 
that he had secured the attention and respect of the 
company; "four squeakers carried off at one swoop.  You'd 
find it rather hard to match that in the way of unlooked-
for bad luck."

"I had six pullets out of a pen of seven killed by a 
snake yesterday afternoon," said Blenkinthrope, in a 
voice which he hardly recognised as his own.

"By a snake?" came in excited chorus.

"It fascinated them with its deadly, glittering 
eyes, one after the other, and struck them down while 
they stood helpless.  A bedridden neighbour, who wasn't 
able to call for assistance, witnessed it all from her 
bedroom window."

"Well, I never!" broke in the chorus, with 
variations.

"The interesting part of it is about the seventh 
pullet, the one that didn't get killed," resumed 
Blenkinthrope, slowly lighting a cigarette.  His 
diffidence had left him, and he was beginning to realise 
how safe and easy depravity can seem once one has the 
courage to begin.  "The six dead birds were Minorcas; the 
seventh was a Houdan with a mop of feathers all over its 
eyes.  It could hardly see the snake at all, so of course 
it wasn't mesmerised like the others.  It just could see 
something wriggling on the ground, and went for it and 
pecked it to death."

"Well, I'm blessed!" exclaimed the chorus.

In the course of the next few days Blenkinthrope 
discovered how little the loss of one's self-respect 
affects one when one has gained the esteem of the world.  
His story found its way into one of the poultry papers, 
and was copied thence into a daily news-sheet as a matter 
of general interest.  A lady wrote from the North of 
Scotland recounting a similar episode which she had 
witnessed as occurring between a stoat and a blind 
grouse.  Somehow a lie seems so much less reprehensible 
when one can call it a lee.

For awhile the adapter of the Seventh Pullet story 
enjoyed to the full his altered standing as a person of 
consequence, one who had had some share in the strange 
events of his times.  Then he was thrust once again into 
the cold grey background by the sudden blossoming into 
importance of Smith-Paddon, a daily fellow-traveller, 
whose little girl had been knocked down and nearly hurt 
by a car belonging to a musical-comedy actress.  The 
actress was not in the car at the time, but she was in 
numerous photographs which appeared in the illustrated 
papers of Zoto Dobreen inquiring after the well-being of 
Maisie, daughter of Edmund Smith-Paddon, Esq.  With this 
new human interest to absorb them the travelling 
companions were almost rude when Blenkinthrope tried to 
explain his contrivance for keeping vipers and peregrine 
falcons out of his chicken-run.

Gorworth, to whom he unburdened himself in private, 
gave him the same counsel as heretofore.

"Invent something."

"Yes, but what?"

The ready affirmative coupled with the question 
betrayed a significant shifting of the ethical 
standpoint.

It was a few days later that Blenkinthrope revealed 
a chapter of family history to the customary gathering in 
the railway carriage.

"Curious thing happened to my aunt, the one who 
lives in Paris," he began.  He had several aunts, but 
they were all geographically distributed over Greater 
London.

"She was sitting on a seat in the Bois the other 
afternoon, after lunching at the Roumanian Legation."

Whatever the story gained in picturesqueness from 
the dragging-in of diplomatic "atmosphere," it ceased 
from that moment to command any acceptance as a record of 
current events.  Gorworth had warned his neophyte that 
this would be the case, but the traditional enthusiasm of 
the neophyte had triumphed over discretion.

"She was feeling rather drowsy, the effect probably 
of the champagne, which she's not in the habit of taking 
in the middle of the day."

A subdued murmur of admiration went round the 
company.  Blenkinthrope's aunts were not used to taking 
champagne in the middle of the year, regarding it 
exclusively as a Christmas and New Year accessory.

"Presently a rather portly gentleman passed by her 
seat and paused an instant to light a cigar.  At that 
moment a youngish man came up behind him, drew the blade 
from a swordstick, and stabbed him half a dozen times 
through and through.  'Scoundrel,' he cried to his 
victim, 'you do not know me.  My name is Henri Leturc.'  
The elder man wiped away some of the blood that was 
spattering his clothes, turned to his assailant, and 
said: `And since when has an attempted assassination been 
considered an introduction?'  Then he finished lighting 
his cigar and walked away.  My aunt had intended 
screaming for the police, but seeing the indifference 
with which the principal in the affair treated the matter 
she felt that it would be an impertinence on her part to 
interfere.  Of course I need hardly say she put the whole 
thing down to the effects of a warm, drowsy afternoon and 
the Legation champagne.  Now comes the astonishing part 
of my story.  A fortnight later a bank manager was 
stabbed to death with a swordstick in that very part of 
the Bois.  His assassin was the son of a charwoman 
formerly working at the bank, who had been dismissed from 
her job by the manager on account of chronic 
intemperance.  His name was Henri Leturc."

From that moment Blenkinthrope was tacitly accepted 
as the Munchausen of the party.  No effort was spared to 
draw him out from day to day in the exercise of testing 
their powers of credulity, and Blenkinthrope, in the 
false security of an assured and receptive audience, 
waxed industrious and ingenious in supplying the demand 
for marvels.  Duckby's satirical story of a tame otter 
that had a tank in the garden to swim in, and whined 
restlessly whenever the water-rate was overdue, was 
scarcely an unfair parody of some of Blenkinthrope's 
wilder efforts.  And then one day came Nemesis.

Returning to his villa one evening Blenkinthrope 
found his wife sitting in front of a pack of cards, which 
she was scrutinising with unusual concentration.

"The same old patience-game?" he asked carelessly.

"No, dear; this is the Death's Head patience, the 
most difficult of them all.  I've never got it to work 
out, and somehow I should be rather frightened if I did.  
Mother only got it out once in her life; she was afraid 
of it, too.  Her great-aunt had done it once and fallen 
dead from excitement the next moment, and mother always 
had a feeling that she would die if she ever got it out.  
She died the same night that she did it.  She was in bad 
health at the time, certainly, but it was a strange 
coincidence."

"Don't do it if it frightens you," was 
Blenkinthrope's practical comment as he left the room.  A 
few minutes later his wife called to him.

"John, it gave me such a turn, I nearly got it out.  
Only the five of diamonds held me up at the end.  I 
really thought I'd done it."

"Why, you can do it," said Blenkinthrope, who had 
come back to the room; "if you shift the eight of clubs 
on to that open nine the five can be moved on to the 
six."

His wife made the suggested move with hasty, 
trembling fingers, and piled the outstanding cards on to 
their respective packs.  Then she followed the example of 
her mother and great-grand-aunt.

Blenkinthrope had been genuinely fond of his wife, 
but in the midst of his bereavement one dominant thought 
obtruded itself.  Something sensational and real had at 
last come into his life; no longer was it a grey, 
colourless record.  The headlines which might 
appropriately describe his domestic tragedy kept shaping 
themselves in his brain.  "Inherited presentiment comes 
true."  "The Death's Head patience: Card-game that 
justified its sinister name in three generations."  He 
wrote out a full story of the fatal occurrence for the 
ESSEX VEDETTE, the editor of which was a friend of his, 
and to another friend he gave a condensed account, to be 
taken up to the office of one of the halfpenny dailies.  
But in both cases his reputation as a romancer stood 
fatally in the way of the fulfilment of his ambitions.  
"Not the right thing to be Munchausening in a time of 
sorrow" agreed his friends among themselves, and a brief 
note of regret at the "sudden death of the wife of our 
respected neighbour, Mr. John Blenkinthrope, from heart 
failure," appearing in the news column of the local paper 
was the forlorn outcome of his visions of widespread 
publicity.

Blenkinthrope shrank from the society of his 
erstwhile travelling companions and took to travelling 
townwards by an earlier train.  He sometimes tries to 
enlist the sympathy and attention of a chance 
acquaintance in details of the whistling prowess of his 
best canary or the dimensions of his largest beetroot; he 
scarcely recognises himself as the man who was once 
spoken about and pointed out as the owner of the Seventh 
Pullet.


THE BLIND SPOT


"YOU'VE just come back from Adelaide's funeral, 
haven't you?" said Sir Lulworth to his nephew; "I suppose 
it was very like most other funerals?"

"I'll tell you all about it at lunch," said Egbert.

"You'll do nothing of the sort.  It wouldn't be 
respectful either to your great-aunt's memory or to the 
lunch.  We begin with Spanish olives, then a borshch, 
then more olives and a bird of some kind, and a rather 
enticing Rhenish wine, not at all expensive as wines go 
in this country, but still quite laudable in its way.  
Now there's absolutely nothing in that menu that 
harmonises in the least with the subject of your great-
aunt Adelaide or her funeral.  She was a charming woman, 
and quite as intelligent as she had any need to be, but 
somehow she always reminded me of an English cook's idea 
of a Madras curry."

"She used to say you were frivolous," said Egbert.  
Something in his tone suggested that he rather endorsed 
the verdict.

"I believe I once considerably scandalised her by 
declaring that clear soup was a more important factor in 
life than a clear conscience.  She had very little sense 
of proportion.  By the way, she made you her principal 
heir, didn't she?"

"Yes," said Egbert, "and executor as well.  It's in 
that connection that I particularly want to speak to 
you."

"Business is not my strong point at any time," said 
Sir Lulworth, "and certainly not when we're on the 
immediate threshold of lunch."

"It isn't exactly business," explained Egbert, as he 
followed his uncle into the dining-room.

"It's something rather serious.  Very serious."

"Then we can't possibly speak about it now," said 
Sir Lulworth; "no one could talk seriously during a 
borshch.  A beautifully constructed borshch, such as you 
are going to experience presently, ought not only to 
banish conversation but almost to annihilate thought.  
Later on, when we arrive at the second stage of olives, I 
shall be quite ready to discuss that new book on Borrow, 
or, if you prefer it, the present situation in the Grand 
Duchy of Luxemburg.  But I absolutely decline to talk 
anything approaching business till we have finished with 
the bird."

For the greater part of the meal Egbert sat in an 
abstracted silence, the silence of a man whose mind is 
focussed on one topic.  When the coffee stage had been 
reached he launched himself suddenly athwart his uncle's 
reminiscences of the Court of Luxemburg.

"I think I told you that great-aunt Adelaide had 
made me her executor.  There wasn't very much to be done 
in the way of legal matters, but I had to go through her 
papers."

"That would be a fairly heavy task in itself.  I 
should imagine there were reams of family letters."

"Stacks of them, and most of them highly 
uninteresting.  There was one packet, however, which I 
thought might repay a careful perusal.  It was a bundle 
of correspondence from her brother Peter."

"The Canon of tragic memory," said Lulworth.

"Exactly, of tragic memory, as you say; a tragedy 
that has never been fathomed."

"Probably the simplest explanation was the correct 
one," said Sir Lulworth; "he slipped on the stone 
staircase and fractured his skull in falling."

Egbert shook his head.  "The medical evidence all 
went to prove that the blow on the head was struck by 
some one coming up behind him.  A wound caused by violent 
contact with the steps could not possibly have been 
inflicted at that angle of the skull.  They experimented 
with a dummy figure falling in every conceivable 
position."

"But the motive?" exclaimed Sir Lulworth; "no one 
had any interest in doing away with him, and the number 
of people who destroy Canons of the Established Church 
for the mere fun of killing must be extremely limited.  
Of course there are individuals of weak mental balance 
who do that sort of thing, but they seldom conceal their 
handiwork; they are more generally inclined to parade 
it."

"His cook was under suspicion," said Egbert shortly.

"I know he was," said Sir Lulworth, "simply because 
he was about the only person on the premises at the time 
of the tragedy.  But could anything be sillier than 
trying to fasten a charge of murder on to Sebastien?  He 
had nothing to gain, in fact, a good deal to lose, from 
the death of his employer.  The Canon was paying him 
quite as good wages as I was able to offer him when I 
took him over into my service.  I have since raised them 
to something a little more in accordance with his real 
worth, but at the time he was glad to find a new place 
without troubling about an increase of wages.  People 
were fighting rather shy of him, and he had no friends in 
this country.  No; if anyone in the world was interested 
in the prolonged life and unimpaired digestion of the 
Canon it would certainly be Sebastien."

"People don't always weigh the consequences of their 
rash acts," said Egbert, "otherwise there would be very 
few murders committed.  Sebastien is a man of hot 
temper."

"He is a southerner," admitted Sir Lulworth; "to be 
geographically exact I believe he hails from the French 
slopes of the Pyrenees.  I took that into consideration 
when he nearly killed the gardener's boy the other day 
for bringing him a spurious substitute for sorrel.  One 
must always make allowances for origin and locality and 
early environment; `Tell me your longitude and I'll know 
what latitude to allow you,' is my motto."

"There, you see," said Egbert, "he nearly killed the 
gardener's boy."

"My dear Egbert, between nearly killing a gardener's 
boy and altogether killing a Canon there is a wide 
difference.  No doubt you have often felt a temporary 
desire to kill a gardener's boy; you have never given way 
to it, and I respect you for your self-control.  But I 
don't suppose you have ever wanted to kill an 
octogenarian Canon.  Besides, as far as we know, there 
had never been any quarrel or disagreement between the 
two men.  The evidence at the inquest brought that out 
very clearly."

"Ah!" said Egbert, with the air of a man coming at 
last into a deferred inheritance of conversational 
importance, "that is precisely what I want to speak to 
you about."

He pushed away his coffee cup and drew a pocket-book 
from his inner breast-pocket.  From the depths of the 
pocket-book he produced an envelope, and from the 
envelope he extracted a letter, closely written in a 
small, neat handwriting.

"One of the Canon's numerous letters to Aunt 
Adelaide," he explained, "written a few days before his 
death.  Her memory was already failing when she received 
it, and I daresay she forgot the contents as soon as she 
had read it; otherwise, in the light of what subsequently 
happened, we should have heard something of this letter 
before now.  If it had been produced at the inquest I 
fancy it would have made some difference in the course of 
affairs.  The evidence, as you remarked just now, choked 
off suspicion against Sebastien by disclosing an utter 
absence of anything that could be considered a motive or 
provocation for the crime, if crime there was."

"Oh, read the letter," said Sir Lulworth 
impatiently.

"It's a long rambling affair, like most of his 
letters in his later years," said Egbert.  "I'll read the 
part that bears immediately on the mystery.

" 'I very much fear I shall have to get rid of 
Sebastien.  He cooks divinely, but he has the temper of a 
fiend or an anthropoid ape, and I am really in bodily 
fear of him.  We had a dispute the other day as to the 
correct sort of lunch to be served on Ash Wednesday, and 
I got so irritated and annoyed at his conceit and 
obstinacy that at last I threw a cupful of coffee in his 
face and called him at the same time an impudent 
jackanapes.  Very little of the coffee went actually in 
his face, but I have never seen a human being show such 
deplorable lack of self-control.  I laughed at the threat 
of killing me that he spluttered out in his rage, and 
thought the whole thing would blow over, but I have 
several times since caught him scowling and muttering in 
a highly unpleasant fashion, and lately I have fancied 
that he was dogging my footsteps about the grounds, 
particularly when I walk of an evening in the Italian 
Garden.'

"It was on the steps in the Italian Garden that the 
body was found," commented Egbert, and resumed reading.

" 'I daresay the danger is imaginary; but I shall 
feel more at ease when he has quitted my service.' "

Egbert paused for a moment at the conclusion of the 
extract; then, as his uncle made no remark, he added: "If 
lack of motive was the only factor that saved Sebastien 
from prosecution I fancy this letter will put a different 
complexion on matters."

"Have you shown it to anyone else?" asked Sir 
Lulworth, reaching out his hand for the incriminating 
piece of paper.

"No," said Egbert, handing it across the table, "I 
thought I would tell you about it first.  Heavens, what 
are you doing?"

Egbert's voice rose almost to a scream.  Sir 
Lulworth had flung the paper well and truly into the 
glowing centre of the grate.  The small, neat hand-
writing shrivelled into black flaky nothingness.

"What on earth did you do that for?" gasped Egbert.  
"That letter was our one piece of evidence to connect 
Sebastien with the crime."

"That is why I destroyed it," said Sir Lulworth.

"But why should you want to shield him?" cried 
Egbert; "the man is a common murderer."

"A common murderer, possibly, but a very uncommon 
cook."


DUSK


NORMAN GORTSBY sat on a bench in the Park, with his 
back to a strip of bush-planted sward, fenced by the park 
railings, and the Row fronting him across a wide stretch 
of carriage drive.  Hyde Park Corner, with its rattle and 
hoot of traffic, lay immediately to his right.  It was 
some thirty minutes past six on an early March evening, 
and dusk had fallen heavily over the scene, dusk 
mitigated by some faint moonlight and many street lamps.  
There was a wide emptiness over road and sidewalk, and 
yet there were many unconsidered figures moving silently 
through the half-light, or dotted unobtrusively on bench 
and chair, scarcely to be distinguished from the shadowed 
gloom in which they sat.

The scene pleased Gortsby and harmonised with his 
present mood.  Dusk, to his mind, was the hour of the 
defeated.  Men and women, who had fought and lost, who 
hid their fallen fortunes and dead hopes as far as 
possible from the scrutiny of the curious, came forth in 
this hour of gloaming, when their shabby clothes and 
bowed shoulders and unhappy eyes might pass unnoticed, 
or, at any rate, unrecognised.


A king that is conquered must see strange looks,
So bitter a thing is the heart of man.


The wanderers in the dusk did not choose to have 
strange looks fasten on them, therefore they came out in 
this bat-fashion, taking their pleasure sadly in a 
pleasure-ground that had emptied of its rightful 
occupants.  Beyond the sheltering screen of bushes and 
palings came a realm of brilliant lights and noisy, 
rushing traffic.  A blazing, many-tiered stretch of 
windows shone through the dusk and almost dispersed it, 
marking the haunts of those other people, who held their 
own in life's struggle, or at any rate had not had to 
admit failure.  So Gortsby's imagination pictured things 
as he sat on his bench in the almost deserted walk.  He 
was in the mood to count himself among the defeated.  
Money troubles did not press on him; had he so wished he 
could have strolled into the thoroughfares of light and 
noise, and taken his place among the jostling ranks of 
those who enjoyed prosperity or struggled for it.  He had 
failed in a more subtle ambition, and for the moment he 
was heartsore and disillusionised, and not disinclined to 
take a certain cynical pleasure in observing and 
labelling his fellow wanderers as they went their ways in 
the dark stretches between the lamp-lights.

On the bench by his side sat an elderly gentleman 
with a drooping air of defiance that was probably the 
remaining vestige of self-respect in an individual who 
had ceased to defy successfully anybody or anything.  His 
clothes could scarcely be called shabby, at least they 
passed muster in the half-light, but one's imagination 
could not have pictured the wearer embarking on the 
purchase of a half-crown box of chocolates or laying out 
ninepence on a carnation buttonhole.  He belonged 
unmistakably to that forlorn orchestra to whose piping no 
one dances; he was one of the world's lamenters who 
induce no responsive weeping.  As he rose to go Gortsby 
imagined him returning to a home circle where he was 
snubbed and of no account, or to some bleak lodging where 
his ability to pay a weekly bill was the beginning and 
end of the interest he inspired.  His retreating figure 
vanished slowly into the shadows, and his place on the 
bench was taken almost immediately by a young man, fairly 
well dressed but scarcely more cheerful of mien than his 
predecessor.  As if to emphasise the fact that the world 
went badly with him the new-corner unburdened himself of 
an angry and very audible expletive as he flung himself 
into the seat.

"You don't seem in a very good temper," said 
Gortsby, judging that he was expected to take due notice 
of the demonstration.

The young man turned to him with a look of disarming 
frankness which put him instantly on his guard.

"You wouldn't be in a good temper if you were in the 
fix I'm in," he said; "I've done the silliest thing I've 
ever done in my life."

"Yes?" said Gortsby dispassionately.

"Came up this afternoon, meaning to stay at the 
Patagonian Hotel in Berkshire Square," continued the 
young man; "when I got there I found it had been pulled 
down some weeks ago and a cinema theatre run up on the 
site.  The taxi driver recommended me to another hotel 
some way off and I went there.  I just sent a letter to 
my people, giving them the address, and then I went out 
to buy some soap - I'd forgotten to pack any and I hate 
using hotel soap.  Then I strolled about a bit, had a 
drink at a bar and looked at the shops, and when I came 
to turn my steps back to the hotel I suddenly realised 
that I didn't remember its name or even what street it 
was in.  There's a nice predicament for a fellow who 
hasn't any friends or connections in London!  Of course I 
can wire to my people for the address, but they won't 
have got my letter till to-morrow; meantime I'm without 
any money, came out with about a shilling on me, which 
went in buying the soap and getting the drink, and here I 
am, wandering about with twopence in my pocket and 
nowhere to go for the night."

There was an eloquent pause after the story had been 
told.  "I suppose you think I've spun you rather an 
impossible yarn," said the young man presently,with a 
suggestion of resentment in his voice.

"Not at all impossible," said Gortsby judicially; "I 
remember doing exactly the same thing once in a foreign 
capital, and on that occasion there were two of us, which 
made it more remarkable.  Luckily we remembered that the 
hotel was on a sort of canal, and when we struck the 
canal we were able to find our way back to the hotel."

The youth brightened at the reminiscence.  "In a 
foreign city I wouldn't mind so much," he said; "one 
could go to one's Consul and get the requisite help from 
him.  Here in one's own land one is far more derelict if 
one gets into a fix.  Unless I can find some decent chap 
to swallow my story and lend me some money I seem likely 
to spend the night on the Embankment.  I'm glad, anyhow, 
that you don't think the story outrageously improbable."

He threw a good deal of warmth into the last remark, 
as though perhaps to indicate his hope that Gortsby did 
not fall far short of the requisite decency.

"Of course," said Gortsby slowly, "the weak point of 
your story is that you can't produce the soap."

The young man sat forward hurriedly, felt rapidly in 
the pockets of his overcoat, and then jumped to his feet.

"I must have lost it," he muttered angrily.

"To lose an hotel and a cake of soap on one 
afternoon suggests wilful carelessness," said Gortsby, 
but the young man scarcely waited to hear the end of the 
remark.  He flitted away down the path, his head held 
high, with an air of somewhat jaded jauntiness.

"It was a pity," mused Gortsby; "the going out to 
get one's own soap was the one convincing touch in the 
whole story, and yet it was just that little detail that 
brought him to grief.  If he had had the brilliant 
forethought to provide himself with a cake of soap, 
wrapped and sealed with all the solicitude of the 
chemist's counter, he would have been a genius in his 
particular line.  In his particular line genius certainly 
consists of an infinite capacity for taking precautions."

With that reflection Gortsby rose to go; as he did 
so an exclamation of concern escaped him.  Lying on the 
ground by the side of the bench was a small oval packet, 
wrapped and sealed with the solicitude of a chemist's 
counter.  It could be nothing else but a cake of soap, 
and it had evidently fallen out of the youth's overcoat 
pocket when he flung himself down on the seat.  In 
another moment Gortsby was scudding along the dusk-
shrouded path in anxious quest for a youthful figure in a 
light overcoat.  He had nearly given up the search when 
he caught sight of the object of his pursuit standing 
irresolutely on the border of the carriage drive, 
evidently uncertain whether to strike across the Park or 
make for the bustling pavements of Knightsbridge.  He 
turned round sharply with an air of defensive hostility 
when he found Gortsby hailing him.

"The important witness to the genuineness of your 
story has turned up," said Gortsby, holding out the cake 
of soap; "it must have slid out of your overcoat pocket 
when you sat down on the seat.  I saw it on the ground 
after you left.  You must excuse my disbelief, but 
appearances were really rather against you, and now, as I 
appealed to the testimony of the soap I think I ought to 
abide by its verdict.  If the loan of a sovereign is any 
good to you - "

The young man hastily removed all doubt on the 
subject by pocketing the coin.

"Here is my card with my address," continued 
Gortsby; "any day this week will do for returning the 
money, and here is the soap - don't lose it again it's 
been a good friend to you."

"Lucky thing your finding it," said the youth, and 
then, with a catch in his voice, he blurted out a word or 
two of thanks and fled headlong in the direction of 
Knightsbridge.

"Poor boy, he as nearly as possible broke down," 
said Gortsby to himself.  "I don't wonder either; the 
relief from his quandary must have been acute.  It's a 
lesson to me not to be too clever in judging by 
circumstances."

As Gortsby retraced his steps past the seat where 
the little drama had taken place he saw an elderly 
gentleman poking and peering beneath it and on all sides 
of it, and recognised his earlier fellow occupant.

"Have you lost anything, sir?" he asked.

"Yes, sir, a cake of soap."


A TOUCH OF REALISM


"I HOPE you've come full of suggestions for 
Christmas," said Lady Blonze to her latest arrived guest; 
"the old-fashioned Christmas and the up-to-date Christmas 
are both so played out.  I want to have something really 
original this year."

"I was staying with the Mathesons last month," said 
Blanche Boveal eagerly, "and we had such a good idea.  
Every one in the house-party had to be a character and 
behave consistently all the time, and at the end of the 
visit one had to guess what every one's character was.  
The one who was voted to have acted his or her character 
best got a prize."

"It sounds amusing," said Lady Blonze.

"I was St. Francis of Assisi," continued Blanche; 
"we hadn't got to keep to our right sexes.  I kept 
getting up in the middle of a meal, and throwing out food 
to the birds; you see, the chief thing that one remembers 
of St. Francis is that he was fond of the birds.  Every 
one was so stupid about it, and thought that I was the 
old man who feeds the sparrows in the Tuileries Gardens.  
Then Colonel Pentley was the Jolly Miller on the banks of 
Dee."

"How on earth did he do that?" asked Bertie van 
Tahn.

" 'He laughed and sang from morn till night,' " 
explained Blanche.

"How dreadful for the rest of you," said Bertie; 
"and anyway he wasn't on the banks of Dee."

"One had to imagine that," said Blanche.

"If you could imagine all that you might as well 
imagine cattle on the further bank and keep on calling 
them home, Mary-fashion, across the sands of Dee.  Or you 
might change the river to the Yarrow and imagine it was 
on the top of you, and say you were Willie, or whoever it 
was, drowned in Yarrow."

"Of course it's easy to make fun of it," said 
Blanche sharply, "but it was extremely interesting and 
amusing.  The prize was rather a fiasco, though.  You 
see, Millie Matheson said her character was Lady 
Bountiful, and as she was our hostess of course we all 
had to vote that she had carried out her character better 
than anyone.  Otherwise I ought to have got the prize."

"It's quite an idea for a Christmas party," said 
Lady Blonze; "we must certainly do it here."

Sir Nicholas was not so enthusiastic.  "Are you 
quite sure, my dear, that you're wise in doing this 
thing?" he said to his wife when they were alone 
together.  "It might do very well at the Mathesons, where 
they had rather a staid, elderly house-party, but here it 
will be a different matter.  There is the Durmot flapper, 
for instance, who simply stops at nothing, and you know 
what Van Tahn is like.  Then there is Cyril Skatterly; he 
has madness on one side of his family and a Hungarian 
grandmother on the other."

"I don't see what they could do that would matter," 
said Lady Blonze.

"It's the unknown that is to be dreaded," said Sir 
Nicholas.  "If Skatterly took it into his head to 
represent a Bull of Bashan, well, I'd rather not be 
here."

"Of course we shan't allow any Bible characters.  
Besides, I don't know what the Bulls of Bashan really did 
that was so very dreadful; they just came round and 
gaped, as far as I remember."

"My dear, you don't know what Skatterly's Hungarian 
imagination mightn't read into the part; it would be 
small satisfaction to say to him afterwards: 'You've 
behaved as no Bull of Bashan would have behaved.' "

"Oh, you're an alarmist," said Lady Blonze; I 
particularly want to have this idea carried out.  It will 
be sure to be talked about a lot."

"That is quite possible," said Sir Nicholas.


* * * *


Dinner that evening was not a particularly lively 
affair; the strain of trying to impersonate a self-
imposed character or to glean hints of identity from 
other people's conduct acted as a check on the natural 
festivity of such a gathering.  There was a general 
feeling of gratitude and acquiescence when good-natured 
Rachel Klammerstein suggested that there should be an 
hour or two's respite from "the game" while they all 
listened to a little piano-playing after dinner.  
Rachel's love of piano music was not indiscriminate, and 
concentrated itself chiefly on selections rendered by her 
idolised offspring, Moritz and Augusta, who, to do them 
justice, played remarkably well.

The Klammersteins were deservedly popular as 
Christmas guests; they gave expensive gifts lavishly on 
Christmas Day and New Year, and Mrs. Klammerstein had 
already dropped hints of her intention to present the 
prize for the best enacted character in the game 
competition.  Every one had brightened at this prospect; 
if it had fallen to Lady Blonze, as hostess, to provide 
the prize, she would have considered that a little 
souvenir of some twenty or twenty-five shillings' value 
would meet the case, whereas coming from a Klammerstein 
source it would certainly run to several guineas.

The close time for impersonation efforts came to an 
end with the final withdrawal of Moritz and Augusta from 
the piano.  Blanche Boveal retired early, leaving the 
room in a series of laboured leaps that she hoped might 
be recognised as a tolerable imitation of Pavlova.  Vera 
Durmot, the sixteen-year-old flapper, expressed her 
confident opinion that the performance was intended to 
typify Mark Twain's famous jumping frog, and her 
diagnosis of the case found general acceptance.  Another 
guest to set an example of early bed-going was Waldo 
Plubley, who conducted his life on a minutely regulated 
system of time-tables and hygienic routine.  Waldo was a 
plump, indolent young man of seven-and-twenty, whose 
mother had early in his life decided for him that he was 
unusually delicate, and by dint of much coddling and 
home-keeping had succeeded in making him physically soft 
and mentally peevish.  Nine hours' unbroken sleep, 
preceded by elaborate breathing exercises and other 
hygienic ritual, was among the indispensable regulations 
which Waldo imposed on himself, and there were 
innumerable small observances which he exacted from those 
who were in any way obliged to minister to his 
requirements; a special teapot for the decoction of his 
early tea was always solemnly handed over to the bedroom 
staff of any house in which he happened to be staying.  
No one had ever quite mastered the mechanism of this 
precious vessel, but Bertie van Tahn was responsible for 
the legend that its spout had to be kept facing north 
during the process of infusion.

On this particular night the irreducible nine hours 
were severely mutilated by the sudden and by no means 
noiseless incursion of a pyjama-clad figure into Waldo's 
room at an hour midway between midnight and dawn.

"What is the matter?  What are you looking for?" 
asked the awakened and astonished Waldo, slowly 
recognising Van Tahn, who appeared to be searching 
hastily for something he had lost.

"Looking for sheep," was the reply.

"Sheep?" exclaimed Waldo.

"Yes, sheep.  You don't suppose I'm looking for 
giraffes, do you?"

"I don't see why you should expect to find either in 
my room," retorted Waldo furiously.

"I can't argue the matter at this hour of the 
night," said Bertie, and began hastily rummaging in the 
chest of drawers.  Shirts and underwear went flying on to 
the floor.

"There are no sheep here, I tell you," screamed 
Waldo.

"I've only got your word for it," said Bertie, 
whisking most of the bedclothes on to the floor; "if you 
weren't concealing something you wouldn't be so 
agitated."

Waldo was by this time convinced that Van Tahn was 
raving mad, and made an anxious, effort to humour him.

"Go back to bed like a dear fellow," he pleaded, 
"and your sheep will turn up all right in the morning."

"I daresay," said Bertie gloomily, "without their 
tails.  Nice fool I shall look with a lot of Manx sheep."

And by way of emphasising his annoyance at the 
prospect he sent Waldo's pillows flying to the top of the 
wardrobe.

"But WHY no tails?" asked Waldo, whose teeth were 
chattering with fear and rage and lowered temperature.

"My dear boy, have you never heard the ballad of 
Little Bo-Peep?" said Bertie with a chuckle.  "It's my 
character in the Game, you know.  If I didn't go hunting 
about for my lost sheep no one would be able to guess who 
I was; and now go to sleepy weeps like a good child or I 
shall be cross with you."

"I leave you to imagine," wrote Waldo in the course 
of a long letter to his mother, "how much sleep I was 
able to recover that night, and you know how essential 
nine uninterrupted hours of slumber are to my health."

On the other hand he was able to devote some wakeful 
hours to exercises in breathing wrath and fury against 
Bertie van Tahn.

Breakfast at Blonzecourt was a scattered meal, on 
the "come when you please" principle, but the house-party 
was supposed to gather in full strength at lunch.  On the 
day after the "Game" had been started there were, 
however, some notable absentees.  Waldo Plubley, for 
instance, was reported to be nursing a headache.  A large 
breakfast and an "A.B.C." had been taken up to his room, 
but he had made no appearance in the flesh.

"I expect he's playing up to some character," said 
Vera Durmot; "isn't there a thing of Moliere's, 'LE 
MALADE IMAGINAIRE'?  I expect he's that."

Eight or nine lists came out, and were duly 
pencilled with the suggestion.

"And where are the Klammersteins?" asked Lady 
Blonze; "they're usually so punctual."

"Another character pose, perhaps," said Bertie van 
Tahn; " 'the Lost Ten Tribes.' "

"But there are only three of them.  Besides, they'll 
want their lunch.  Hasn't anyone seen anything of them?"

"Didn't you take them out in your car?" asked 
Blanche Boveal, addressing herself to Cyril Skatterly.

"Yes, took them out to Slogberry Moor immediately 
after breakfast.  Miss Durmot came too."

"I saw you and Vera come back," said Lady Blonze, 
"but I didn't see the Klammersteins.  Did you put them 
down in the village?"

"No," said Skatterly shortly.

"But where are they?  Where did you leave them?"

"We left them on Slogberry Moor," said Vera calmly.

"On Slogberry Moor?  Why, it's more than thirty 
miles away!  How are they going to get back?"

"We didn't stop to consider that," said Skatterly; 
"we asked them to get out for a moment, on the pretence 
that the car had stuck, and then we dashed off full speed 
and left them there."

"But how dare you do such a thing?  It's most 
inhuman!  Why, it's been snowing for the last hour."

"I expect there'll be a cottage or farmhouse 
somewhere if they walk a mile or two."

"But why on earth have you done it?"

The question came in a chorus of indignant 
bewilderment.

"THAT would be telling what our characters are meant 
to be," said Vera.

"Didn't I warn you?" said Sir Nicholas tragically to 
his wife.

"It's something to do with Spanish history; we don't 
mind giving you that clue," said Skatterly, helping 
himself cheerfully to salad, and then Bertie van Tahn 
broke forth into peals of joyous laughter.

"I've got it!  Ferdinand and Isabella deporting the 
Jews!  Oh, lovely!  Those two have certainly won the 
prize; we shan't get anything to beat that for 
thoroughness."

Lady Blonze's Christmas party was talked about and 
written about to an extent that she had not anticipated 
in her most ambitious moments.  The letters from Waldo's 
mother would alone have made it memorable.


COUSIN TERESA


BASSET HARROWCLUFF returned to the home of his 
fathers, after an absence of four years, distinctly well 
pleased with himself.  He was only thirty-one, but he had 
put in some useful service in an out-of-the-way, though 
not unimportant, corner of the world.  He had quieted a 
province, kept open a trade route, enforced the tradition 
of respect which is worth the ransom of many kings in 
out-of-the-way regions, and done the whole business on 
rather less expenditure than would be requisite for 
organising a charity in the home country.  In Whitehall 
and places where they think, they doubtless thought well 
of him.  It was not inconceivable, his father allowed 
himself to imagine, that Basset's name might figure in 
the next list of Honours.

Basset was inclined to be rather contemptuous of his 
half-brother, Lucas, whom he found feverishly engrossed 
in the same medley of elaborate futilities that had 
claimed his whole time and energies, such as they were, 
four years ago, and almost as far back before that as he 
could remember.  It was the contempt of the man of action 
for the man of activities, and it was probably 
reciprocated.  Lucas was an over-well nourished 
individual, some nine years Basset's senior, with a 
colouring that would have been accepted as a sign of 
intensive culture in an asparagus, but probably meant in 
this case mere abstention from exercise.  His hair and 
forehead furnished a recessional note in a personality 
that was in all other respects obtrusive and assertive.  
There was certainly no Semitic blood in Lucas's 
parentage, but his appearance contrived to convey at 
least a suggestion of Jewish extraction.  Clovis 
Sangrail, who knew most of his associates by sight, said 
it was undoubtedly a case of protective mimicry.

Two days after Basset's return, Lucas frisked in to 
lunch in a state of twittering excitement that could not 
be restrained even for the immediate consideration of 
soup, but had to be verbally discharged in spluttering 
competition with mouthfuls of vermicelli.

"I've got hold of an idea for something immense," he 
babbled, "something that is simply It."

Basset gave a short laugh that would have done 
equally well as a snort, if one had wanted to make the 
exchange.  His half-brother was in the habit of 
discovering futilities that were "simply It" at 
frequently recurring intervals.  The discovery generally 
meant that he flew up to town, preceded by glowingly-
worded telegrams, to see some one connected with the 
stage or the publishing world, got together one or two 
momentous luncheon parties, flitted in and out of 
"Gambrinus" for one or two evenings, and returned home 
with an air of subdued importance and the asparagus tint 
slightly intensified.  The great idea was generally 
forgotten a few weeks later in the excitement of some new 
discovery.

"The inspiration came to me whilst I was dressing," 
announced Lucas; "it will be THE thing in the next music-
hall REVUE.  All London will go mad over it.  It's just a 
couplet; of course there will be other words, but they 
won't matter.  Listen:


Cousin Teresa takes out Caesar,
Fido, Jock, and the big borzoi.


A lifting, catchy sort of refrain, you see, and big-
drum business on the two syllables of bor-zoi.  It's 
immense.  And I've thought out all the business of it; 
the singer will sing the first verse alone, then during 
the second verse Cousin Teresa will walk through, 
followed by four wooden dogs on wheels; Caesar will be an 
Irish terrier, Fido a black poodle, Jock a fox-terrier, 
and the borzoi, of course, will be a borzoi.  During the 
third verse Cousin Teresa will come on alone, and the 
dogs will be drawn across by themselves from the opposite 
wing; then Cousin Teresa will catch on to the singer and 
go off-stage in one direction, while the dogs' procession 
goes off in the other, crossing en route, which is always 
very effective.  There'll be a lot of applause there, and 
for the fourth verse Cousin Teresa will come on in sables 
and the dogs will all have coats on.  Then I've got a 
great idea for the fifth verse; each of the dogs will be 
led on by a Nut, and Cousin Teresa will come on from the 
opposite side, crossing en route, always effective, and 
then she turns round and leads the whole lot of them off 
on a string, and all the time every one singing like mad:


Cousin Teresa takes out Caesar
Fido, Jock, and the big borzoi.


Tum-Tum!  Drum business on the two last syllables.  
I'm so excited, I shan't sleep a wink to-night.  I'm off 
to-morrow by the ten-fifteen.  I've wired to Hermanova to 
lunch with me."

If any of the rest of the family felt any excitement 
over the creation of Cousin Teresa, they were signally 
successful in concealing the fact.

"Poor Lucas does take his silly little ideas 
seriously," said Colonel Harrowcluff afterwards in the 
smoking-room.

"Yes," said his younger son, in a slightly less 
tolerant tone, "in a day or two he'll come back and tell 
us that his sensational masterpiece is above the heads of 
the public, and in about three weeks' time he'll be wild 
with enthusiasm over a scheme to dramatise the poems of 
Herrick or something equally promising."

And then an extraordinary thing befell.  In defiance 
of all precedent Lucas's glowing anticipations were 
justified and endorsed by the course of events.  If 
Cousin Teresa was above the heads of the public, the 
public heroically adapted itself to her altitude.  
Introduced as an experiment at a dull moment in a new 
REVUE, the success of the item was unmistakable; the 
calls were so insistent and uproarious that even Lucas' 
ample devisings of additional "business" scarcely 
sufficed to keep pace with the demand.  Packed houses on 
successive evenings confirmed the verdict of the first 
night audience, stalls and boxes filled significantly 
just before the turn came on, and emptied significantly 
after the last ENCORE had been given.  The manager 
tearfully acknowledged that Cousin Teresa was It.  Stage 
hands and supers and programme sellers acknowledged it to 
one another without the least reservation.  The name of 
the REVUE dwindled to secondary importance, and vast 
letters of electric blue blazoned the words "Cousin 
Teresa" from the front of the great palace of pleasure.  
And, of course, the magic of the famous refrain laid its 
spell all over the Metropolis.  Restaurant proprietors 
were obliged to provide the members of their orchestras 
with painted wooden dogs on wheels, in order that the 
much-demanded and always conceded melody should be 
rendered with the necessary spectacular effects, and the 
crash of bottles and forks on the tables at the mention 
of the big borzoi usually drowned the sincerest efforts 
of drum or cymbals.  Nowhere and at no time could one get 
away from the double thump that brought up the rear of 
the refrain; revellers reeling home at night banged it on 
doors and hoardings, milkmen clashed their cans to its 
cadence, messenger boys hit smaller messenger boys 
resounding double smacks on the same principle.  And the 
more thoughtful circles of the great city were not deaf 
to the claims and significance of the popular melody.  An 
enterprising and emancipated preacher discoursed from his 
pulpit on the inner meaning of "Cousin Teresa," and Lucas 
Harrowcluff was invited to lecture on the subject of his 
great achievement to members of the Young Mens' Endeavour 
League, the Nine Arts Club, and other learned and 
willing-to-learn bodies.  In Society it seemed to be the 
one thing people really cared to talk about; men and 
women of middle age and average education might be seen 
together in corners earnestly discussing, not the 
question whether Servia should have an outlet on the 
Adriatic, or the possibilities of a British success in 
international polo contests, but the more absorbing topic 
of the problematic Aztec or Nilotic origin of the Teresa 
MOTIV.

"Politics and patriotism are so boring and so out of 
date," said a revered lady who had some pretensions to 
oracular utterance; "we are too cosmopolitan nowadays to 
be really moved by them.  That is why one welcomes an 
intelligible production like 'Cousin Teresa,' that has a 
genuine message for one.  One can't understand the 
message all at once, of course, but one felt from the 
very first that it was there.  I've been to see it 
eighteen times and I'm going again to-morrow and on 
Thursday.  One can't see it often enough."


* * * *


"It would be rather a popular move if we gave this 
Harrowcluff person a knighthood or something of the 
sort," said the Minister reflectively.

"Which Harrowcluff?"asked his secretary.

"Which?  There is only one, isn't there?" said the 
Minister; "the 'Cousin Teresa' man, of course.  I think 
every one would be pleased if we knighted him.  Yes, you 
can put him down on the list of certainties - under the 
letter L."

"The letter L," said the secretary, who was new to 
his job; "does that stand for Liberalism or liberality?"

Most of the recipients of Ministerial favour were 
expected to qualify in both of those subjects.

"Literature," explained the Minister.

And thus, after a fashion, Colonel Harrowcluff's 
expectation of seeing his son's name in the list of 
Honours was gratified.


THE YARKAND MANNER


SIR LULWORTH QUAYNE was making a leisurely progress 
through the Zoological Society's Gardens in company with 
his nephew, recently returned from Mexico.  The latter 
was interested in comparing and contrasting allied types 
of animals occurring in the North American and Old World 
fauna.

"One of the most remarkable things in the wanderings 
of species," he observed, "is the sudden impulse to trek 
and migrate that breaks out now and again, for no 
apparent reason, in communities of hitherto stay-at-home 
animals."

"In human affairs the same phenomenon is 
occasionally noticeable," said Sir Lulworth; "perhaps the 
most striking instance of it occurred in this country 
while you were away in the wilds of Mexico.  I mean the 
wander fever which suddenly displayed itself in the 
managing and editorial staffs of certain London 
newspapers.  It began with the stampede of the entire 
staff of one of our most brilliant and enterprising 
weeklies to the banks of the Seine and the heights of 
Montmartre.  The migration was a brief one, but it 
heralded an era of restlessness in the Press world which 
lent quite a new meaning to the phrase 'newspaper 
circulation.'  Other editorial staffs were not slow to 
imitate the example that had been set them.  Paris soon 
dropped out of fashion as being too near home; Nurnberg, 
Seville, and Salonica became more favoured as planting-
out grounds for the personnel of not only weekly but 
daily papers as well.  The localities were perhaps not 
always well chosen; the fact of a leading organ of 
Evangelical thought being edited for two successive 
fortnights from Trouville and Monte Carlo was generally 
admitted to have been a mistake.  And even when 
enterprising and adventurous editors took themselves and 
their staffs further afield there were some unavoidable 
clashings.  For instance, the SCRUTATOR, SPORTING BLUFF, 
and THE DAMSELS' OWN PAPER all pitched on Khartoum for 
the same week.  It was, perhaps, a desire to out-distance 
all possible competition that influenced the management 
of the DAILY INTELLIGENCER, one of the most solid and 
respected organs of Liberal opinion, in its decision to 
transfer its offices for three or four weeks from Fleet 
Street to Eastern Turkestan, allowing, of course, a 
necessary margin of time for the journey there and back.  
This was, in many respects, the most remarkable of all 
the Press stampedes that were experienced at this time.  
There was no make-believe about the undertaking; 
proprietor, manager, editor, sub-editors, leader-writers, 
principal reporters, and so forth, all took part in what 
was popularly alluded to as the DRANG NACH OSTEN; an 
intelligent and efficient office-boy was all that was 
left in the deserted hive of editorial industry."

"That was doing things rather thoroughly, wasn't 
it?" said the nephew.

"Well, you see," said Sir Lulworth, "the migration 
idea was falling somewhat into disrepute from the half-
hearted manner in which it was occasionally carried out.  
You were not impressed by the information that such and 
such a paper was being edited and brought out at Lisbon 
or Innsbruck if you chanced to see the principal leader-
writer or the art editor lunching as usual at their 
accustomed restaurants.  The DAILY INTELLIGENCER was 
determined to give no loophole for cavil at the 
genuineness of its pilgrimage, and it must be admitted 
that to a certain extent the arrangements made for 
transmitting copy and carrying on the usual features of 
the paper during the long outward journey worked smoothly 
and well.  The series of articles which commenced at Baku 
on 'What Cobdenism might do for the camel industry' ranks 
among the best of the recent contributions to Free Trade 
literature, while the views on foreign policy enunciated 
'from a roof in Yarkand' showed at least as much grasp of 
the international situation as those that had germinated 
within half a mile of Downing Street.  Quite in keeping, 
too, with the older and better traditions of British 
journalism was the manner of the home-coming; no bombast, 
no personal advertisement, no flamboyant interviews.  
Even a complimentary luncheon at the Voyagers' Club was 
courteously declined.  Indeed, it began to be felt that 
the self-effacement of the returned pressmen was being 
carried to a pedantic length.  Foreman compositors, 
advertisement clerks, and other members of the non-
editorial staff, who had, of course, taken no part in the 
great trek, found it as impossible to get into direct 
communication with the editor and his satellites now that 
they had returned as when they had been excusably 
inaccessible in Central Asia.  The sulky, overworked 
office-boy, who was the one connecting link between the 
editorial brain and the business departments of the 
paper, sardonically explained the new aloofness as the 
'Yarkand manner.'  Most of the reporters and sub-editors 
seemed to have been dismissed in autocratic fashion since 
their return and new ones engaged by letter; to these the 
editor and his immediate associates remained an unseen 
presence, issuing its instructions solely through the 
medium of curt typewritten notes.  Something mystic and 
Tibetan and forbidden had replaced the human bustle and 
democratic simplicity of pre-migration days, and the same 
experience was encountered by those who made social 
overtures to the returned wanderers.  The most brilliant 
hostess of Twentieth Century London flung the pearl of 
her hospitality into the unresponsive trough of the 
editorial letter-box; it seemed as if nothing short of a 
Royal command would drag the hermit-souled REVENANTS from 
their self-imposed seclusion.  People began to talk 
unkindly of the effect of high altitudes and Eastern 
atmosphere on minds and temperaments unused to such 
luxuries.  The Yarkand manner was not popular."

"And the contents of the paper," said the nephew, 
"did they show the influence of the new style?"

"Ah!" said Sir Lulworth, "that was the exciting 
thing.  In home affairs, social questions, and the 
ordinary events of the day not much change was 
noticeable.  A certain Oriental carelessness seemed to 
have crept into the editorial department, and perhaps a 
note of lassitude not unnatural in the work of men who 
had returned from what had been a fairly arduous journey.  
The aforetime standard of excellence was scarcely 
maintained, but at any rate the general lines of policy 
and outlook were not departed from.  It was in the realm 
of foreign affairs that a startling change took place.  
Blunt, forcible, outspoken articles appeared, couched in 
language which nearly turned the autumn manoeuvres of six 
important Powers into mobilisations.  Whatever else the 
DAILY INTELLIGENCER had learned in the East, it had not 
acquired the art of diplomatic ambiguity.  The man in the 
street enjoyed the articles and bought the paper as he 
had never bought it before; the men in Downing Street 
took a different view.  The Foreign Secretary, hitherto 
accounted a rather reticent man, became positively 
garrulous in the course of perpetually disavowing the 
sentiments expressed in the DAILY INTELLIGENCER'S 
leaders; and then one day the Government came to the 
conclusion that something definite and drastic must be 
done.  A deputation, consisting of the Prime Minister, 
the Foreign Secretary, four leading financiers, and a 
well-known Nonconformist divine, made its way to the 
offices of the paper.  At the door leading to the 
editorial department the way was barred by a nervous but 
defiant office-boy.

" 'You can't see the editor nor any of the staff,' 
he announced.

" 'We insist on seeing the editor or some 
responsible person,' said the Prime Minister, and the 
deputation forced its way in.  The boy had spoken truly; 
there was no one to be seen.  In the whole suite of rooms 
there was no sign of human life.

" 'Where is the editor?'  'Or the foreign editor?'  
'Or the chief leader-writer?  Or anybody?'

"In answer to the shower of questions the boy 
unlocked a drawer and produced a strange-looking 
envelope, which bore a Khokand postmark, and a date of 
some seven or eight months back.  It contained a scrap of 
paper on which was written the following message:


" 'Entire party captured by brigand tribe on 
homeward journey.  Quarter of million demanded as ransom, 
but would probably take less.  Inform Government, 
relations, and friends.'


"There followed the signatures of the principal 
members of the party and instructions as to how and where 
the money was to be paid.

"The letter had been directed to the office-boy-in-
charge, who had quietly suppressed it.  No one is a hero 
to one's own office-boy, and he evidently considered that 
a quarter of a million was an unwarrantable outlay for 
such a doubtfully advantageous object as the repatriation 
of an errant newspaper staff.  So he drew the editorial 
and other salaries, forged what signatures were 
necessary, engaged new reporters, did what sub-editing he 
could, and made as much use as possible of the large 
accumulation of special articles that was held in reserve 
for emergencies.  The articles on foreign affairs were 
entirely his own composition.

"Of course the whole thing had to be kept as quiet 
as possible; an interim staff, pledged to secrecy, was 
appointed to keep the paper going till the pining 
captives could be sought out, ransomed, and brought home, 
in twos and threes to escape notice, and gradually things 
were put back on their old footing.  The articles on 
foreign affairs reverted to the wonted traditions of the 
paper."

"But," interposed the nephew, "how on earth did the 
boy account to the relatives all those months for the 
non-appearance - "

"That," said Sir Lulworth, "was the most brilliant 
stroke of all.  To the wife or nearest relative of each 
of the missing men he forwarded a letter, copying the 
handwriting of the supposed writer as well as he could, 
and making excuses about vile pens and ink; in each 
letter he told the same story, varying only the locality, 
to the effect that the writer, alone of the whole party, 
was unable to tear himself away from the wild liberty and 
allurements of Eastern life, and was going to spend 
several months roaming in some selected region.  Many of 
the wives started off immediately in pursuit of their 
errant husbands, and it took the Government a 
considerable time and much trouble to reclaim them from 
their fruitless quests along the banks of the Oxus, the 
Gobi Desert, the Orenburg steppe, and other outlandish 
places.  One of them, I believe, is still lost somewhere 
in the Tigris Valley."

"And the boy?"

"Is still in journalism."


THE BYZANTINE OMELETTE


SOPHIE CHATTEL-MONKHEIM was a Socialist by 
conviction and a Chattel-Monkheim by marriage.  The 
particular member of that wealthy family whom she had 
married was rich, even as his relatives counted riches.  
Sophie had very advanced and decided views as to the 
distribution of money: it was a pleasing and fortunate 
circumstance that she also had the money.  When she 
inveighed eloquently against the evils of capitalism at 
drawing-room meetings and Fabian conferences she was 
conscious of a comfortable feeling that the system, with 
all its inequalities and iniquities, would probably last 
her time.  It is one of the consolations of middle-aged 
reformers that the good they inculcate must live after 
them if it is to live at all.

On a certain spring evening, somewhere towards the 
dinner-hour, Sophie sat tranquilly between her mirror and 
her maid, undergoing the process of having her hair built 
into an elaborate reflection of the prevailing fashion.  
She was hedged round with a great peace, the peace of one 
who has attained a desired end with much effort and 
perseverance, and who has found it still eminently 
desirable in its attainment.  The Duke of Syria had 
consented to come beneath her roof as a guest, was even 
now installed beneath her roof, and would shortly be 
sitting at her dining-table.  As a good Socialist, Sophie 
disapproved of social distinctions, and derided the idea 
of a princely caste, but if there were to be these 
artificial gradations of rank and dignity she was pleased 
and anxious to have an exalted specimen of an exalted 
order included in her house-party.  She was broad-minded 
enough to love the sinner while hating the sin - not that 
she entertained any warm feeling of personal affection 
for the Duke of Syria, who was a comparative stranger, 
but still, as Duke of Syria, he was very, very welcome 
beneath her roof.  She could not have explained why, but 
no one was likely to ask her for an explanation, and most 
hostesses envied her.

"You must surpass yourself to-night, Richardson," 
she said complacently to her maid; "I must be looking my 
very best.  We must all surpass ourselves."

The maid said nothing, but from the concentrated 
look in her eyes and the deft play of her fingers it was 
evident that she was beset with the ambition to surpass 
herself.

A knock came at the door, a quiet but peremptory 
knock, as of some one who would not be denied.

"Go and see who it is," said Sophie; "it may be 
something about the wine."

Richardson held a hurried conference with an 
invisible messenger at the door; when she returned there 
was noticeable a curious listlessness in place of her 
hitherto alert manner.

"What is it?" asked Sophie.

"The household servants have 'downed tools,' 
madame," said Richardson.

"Downed tools!" exclaimed Sophie; "do you mean to 
say they've gone on strike?"

"Yes, madame," said Richardson, adding the 
information: "It's Gaspare that the trouble is about."

"Gaspare?" said Sophie wanderingly; "the emergency 
chef!  The omelette specialist!"

"Yes, madame.  Before he became an omelette 
specialist he was a valet, and he was one of the strike-
breakers in the great strike at Lord Grimford's two years 
ago.  As soon as the household staff here learned that 
you had engaged him they resolved to `down tools' as a 
protest.  They haven't got any grievance against you 
personally, but they demand that Gaspare should be 
immediately dismissed."

"But," protested Sophie, "he is the only man in 
England who understands how to make a Byzantine omelette.  
I engaged him specially for the Duke of Syria's visit, 
and it would be impossible to replace him at short 
notice.  I should have to send to Paris, and the Duke 
loves Byzantine omelettes.  It was the one thing we 
talked about coming from the station."

"He was one of the strike-breakers at Lord 
Grimford's," reiterated Richardson.

"This is too awful," said Sophie; "a strike of 
servants at a moment like this, with the Duke of Syria 
staying in the house.  Something must be done 
immediately.  Quick, finish my hair and I'll go and see 
what I can do to bring them round."

"I can't finish your hair, madame," said Richardson 
quietly, but with immense decision.  "I belong to the 
union and I can't do another half-minute's work till the 
strike is settled.  I'm sorry to be disobliging."

"But this is inhuman!" exclaimed Sophie tragically; 
"I've always been a model mistress and I've refused to 
employ any but union servants, and this is the result.  I 
can't finish my hair myself; I don't know how to.  What 
am I to do?  It's wicked!"

"Wicked is the word," said Richardson; "I'm a good 
Conservative and I've no patience with this Socialist 
foolery, asking your pardon.  It's tyranny, that's what 
it is, all along the line, but I've my living to make, 
same as other people, and I've got to belong to the 
union.  I couldn't touch another hair-pin without a 
strike permit, not if you was to double my wages."

The door burst open and Catherine Malsom raged into 
the room.

"Here's a nice affair," she screamed, "a strike of 
household servants without a moment's warning, and I'm 
left like this!  I can't appear in public in this 
condition."

After a very hasty scrutiny Sophie assured her that 
she could not.

"Have they all struck?" she asked her maid.

"Not the kitchen staff," said Richardson, "they 
belong to a different union."

"Dinner at least will be assured," said Sophie, 
"that is something to be thankful for."

"Dinner!" snorted Catherine, "what on earth is the 
good of dinner when none of us will be able to appear at 
it?  Look at your hair - and look at me! or rather, 
don't."

"I know it's difficult to manage without a maid; 
can't your husband be any help to you?" asked Sophie 
despairingly.

"Henry?  He's in worse case than any of us.  His man 
is the only person who really understands that ridiculous 
new-fangled Turkish bath that he insists on taking with 
him everywhere."

"Surely he could do without a Turkish bath for one 
evening," said Sophie; "I can't appear without hair, but 
a Turkish bath is a luxury."

"My good woman," said Catherine, speaking with a 
fearful intensity, "Henry was in the bath when the strike 
started.  In it, do you understand?  He's there now."

"Can't he get out?"

"He doesn't know how to.  Every time he pulls the 
lever marked 'release' he only releases hot steam.  There 
are two kinds of steam in the bath, 'bearable' and 
'scarcely bearable'; he has released them both.  By this 
time I'm probably a widow."

"I simply can't send away Gaspare," wailed Sophie; 
"I should never be able to secure another omelette 
specialist."

"Any difficulty that I may experience in securing 
another husband is of course a trifle beneath anyone's 
consideration," said Catherine bitterly.

Sophie capitulated.  "Go," she said to Richardson, 
"and tell the Strike Committee, or whoever are directing 
this affair, that Gaspare is herewith dismissed.  And ask 
Gaspare to see me presently in the library, when I will 
pay him what is due to him and make what excuses I can; 
and then fly back and finish my hair."

Some half an hour later Sophie marshalled her guests 
in the Grand Salon preparatory to the formal march to the 
dining-room.  Except that Henry Malsom was of the ripe 
raspberry tint that one sometimes sees at private 
theatricals representing the human complexion, there was 
little outward sign among those assembled of the crisis 
that had just been encountered and surmounted.  But the 
tension had been too stupefying while it lasted not to 
leave some mental effects behind it.  Sophie talked at 
random to her illustrious guest, and found her eyes 
straying with increasing frequency towards the great 
doors through which would presently come the blessed 
announcement that dinner was served.  Now and again she 
glanced mirror-ward at the reflection of her wonderfully 
coiffed hair, as an insurance underwriter might gaze 
thankfully at an overdue vessel that had ridden safely 
into harbour in the wake of a devastating hurricane.  
Then the doors opened and the welcome figure of the 
butler entered the room.  But he made no general 
announcement of a banquet in readiness, and the doors 
closed behind him; his message was for Sophie alone.

"There is no dinner, madame," he said gravely; "the 
kitchen staff have 'downed tools.'  Gaspare belongs to 
the Union of Cooks and Kitchen Employees, and as soon as 
they heard of his summary dismissal at a moment's notice 
they struck work.  They demand his instant reinstatement 
and an apology to the union.  I may add, madame, that 
they are very firm; I've been obliged even to hand back 
the dinner rolls that were already on the table."

After the lapse of eighteen months Sophie Chattel-
Monkheim is beginning to go about again among her old 
haunts and associates, but she still has to be very 
careful.  The doctors will not let her attend anything at 
all exciting, such as a drawing-room meeting or a Fabian 
conference; it is doubtful, indeed, whether she wants to.


THE FEAST OF NEMESIS


"IT'S a good thing that Saint Valentine's Day has 
dropped out of vogue," said Mrs. Thackenbury; "what with 
Christmas and New Year and Easter, not to speak of 
birthdays, there are quite enough remembrance days as it 
is.  I tried to save myself trouble at Christmas by just 
sending flowers to all my friends, but it wouldn't work; 
Gertrude has eleven hot-houses and about thirty 
gardeners, so it would have been ridiculous to send 
flowers to her, and Milly has just started a florist's 
shop, so it was equally out of the question there.  The 
stress of having to decide in a hurry what to give to 
Gertrude and Milly just when I thought I'd got the whole 
question nicely off my mind completely ruined my 
Christmas, and then the awful monotony of the letters of 
thanks: 'Thank you so much for your lovely flowers.  It 
was so good of you to think of me.'  Of course in the 
majority of cases I hadn't thought about the recipients 
at all; their names were down in my list of 'people who 
must not be left out.'  If I trusted to remembering them 
there would be some awful sins of omission."

"The trouble is," said Clovis to his aunt, "all 
these days of intrusive remembrance harp so persistently 
on one aspect of human nature and entirely ignore the 
other; that is why they become so perfunctory and 
artificial.  At Christmas and New Year you are emboldened 
and encouraged by convention to send gushing messages of 
optimistic goodwill and servile affection to people whom 
you would scarcely ask to lunch unless some one else had 
failed you at the last moment; if you are supping at a 
restaurant on New Year's Eve you are permitted and 
expected to join hands and sing 'For Auld Lang Syne' with 
strangers whom you have never seen before and never want 
to see again.  But no licence is allowed in the opposite 
direction."

"Opposite direction; what opposite direction?"  
queried Mrs. Thackenbury.

"There is no outlet for demonstrating your feelings 
towards people whom you simply loathe.  That is really 
the crying need of our modern civilisation.  Just think 
how jolly it would be if a recognised day were set apart 
for the paying off of old scores and grudges, a day when 
one could lay oneself out to be gracefully vindictive to 
a carefully treasured list of 'people who must not be let 
off.'  I remember when I was at a private school we had 
one day, the last Monday of the term I think it was, 
consecrated to the settlement of feuds and grudges; of 
course we did not appreciate it as much as it deserved, 
because, after all, any day of the term could be used for 
that purpose.  Still, if one had chastised a smaller boy 
for being cheeky weeks before, one was always permitted 
on that day to recall the episode to his memory by 
chastising him again.  That is what the French call 
reconstructing the crime."

"I should call it reconstructing the punishment," 
said Mrs. Thackenbury; "and, anyhow, I don't see how you 
could introduce a system of primitive schoolboy vengeance 
into civilised adult life.  We haven't outgrown our 
passions, but we are supposed to have learned how to keep 
them within strictly decorous limits."

"Of course the thing would have to be done furtively 
and politely," said Clovis; "the charm of it would be 
that it would never be perfunctory like the other thing.  
Now, for instance, you say to yourself: 'I must show the 
Webleys some attention at Christmas, they were kind to 
dear Bertie at Bournemouth,' and you send them a 
calendar, and daily for six days after Christmas the male 
Webley asks the female Webley if she has remembered to 
thank you for the calendar you sent them.  Well, 
transplant that idea to the other and more human side of 
your nature, and say to yourself: 'Next Thursday is 
Nemesis Day; what on earth can I do to those odious 
people next door who made such an absurd fuss when Ping 
Yang bit their youngest child?'  Then you'd get up 
awfully early on the allotted day and climb over into 
their garden and dig for truffles on their tennis court 
with a good gardening fork, choosing, of course, that 
part of the court that was screened from observation by 
the laurel bushes.  You wouldn't find any truffles but 
you would find a great peace, such as no amount of 
present-giving could ever bestow."

"I shouldn't," said Mrs. Thackenbury, though her air 
of protest sounded a bit forced; "I should feel rather a 
worm for doing such a thing."

"You exaggerate the power of upheaval which a worm 
would be able to bring into play in the limited time 
available," said Clovis; "if you put in a strenuous ten 
minutes with a really useful fork, the result ought to 
suggest the operations of an unusually masterful mole or 
a badger in a hurry."

"They might guess I had done it," said Mrs. 
Thackenbury.

"Of course they would," said Clovis; "that would be 
half the satisfaction of the thing, just as you like 
people at Christmas to know what presents or cards you've 
sent them.  The thing would be much easier to manage, of 
course, when you were on outwardly friendly terms with 
the object of your dislike.  That greedy little Agnes 
Blaik, for instance, who thinks of nothing but her food, 
it would be quite simple to ask her to a picnic in some 
wild woodland spot and lose her just before lunch was 
served; when you found her again every morsel of food 
could have been eaten up."

"It would require no ordinary human strategy to lose 
Agnes Blaik when luncheon was imminent: in fact, I don't 
believe it could be done."

"Then have all the other guests, people whom you 
dislike, and lose the luncheon.  It could have been sent 
by accident in the wrong direction."

"It would be a ghastly picnic," said Mrs. 
Thackenbury.

"For them, but not for you," said Clovis; "you would 
have had an early and comforting lunch before you 
started, and you could improve the occasion by mentioning 
in detail the items of the missing banquet - the lobster 
Newburg and the egg mayonnaise, and the curry that was to 
have been heated in a chafing-dish.  Agnes Blaik would be 
delirious long before you got to the list of wines, and 
in the long interval of waiting, before they had quite 
abandoned hope of the lunch turning up, you could induce 
them to play silly games, such as that idiotic one of 
'the Lord Mayor's dinner-party,' in which every one has 
to choose the name of a dish and do something futile when 
it is called out.  In this case they would probably burst 
into tears when their dish is mentioned.  It would be a 
heavenly picnic."

Mrs. Thackenbury was silent for a moment; she was 
probably making a mental list of the people she would 
like to invite to the Duke Humphrey picnic.  Presently 
she asked: "And that odious young man, Waldo Plubley, who 
is always coddling himself - have you thought of anything 
that one could do to him?"  Evidently she was beginning 
to see the possibilities of Nemesis Day.

"If there was anything like a general observance of 
the festival," said Clovis, "Waldo would be in such 
demand that you would have to bespeak him weeks 
beforehand, and even then, if there were an east wind 
blowing or a cloud or two in the sky he might be too 
careful of his precious self to come out.  It would be 
rather jolly if you could lure him into a hammock in the 
orchard, just near the spot where there is a wasps' nest 
every summer.  A comfortable hammock on a warm afternoon 
would appeal to his indolent tastes, and then, when he 
was getting drowsy, a lighted fusee thrown into the nest 
would bring the wasps out in an indignant mass, and they 
would soon find a 'home away from home' on Waldo's fat 
body.  It takes some doing to get out of a hammock in a 
hurry."

"They might sting him to death," protested Mrs. 
Thackenbury.

"Waldo is one of those people who would be 
enormously improved by death," said Clovis; "but if you 
didn't want to go as far as that, you could have some wet 
straw ready to hand, and set it alight under the hammock 
at the same time that the fusee was thrown into the nest; 
the smoke would keep all but the most militant of the 
wasps just outside the stinging line, and as long as 
Waldo remained within its protection he would escape 
serious damage, and could be eventually restored to his 
mother, kippered all over and swollen in places, but 
still perfectly recognisable."

"His mother would be my enemy for life," said Mrs. 
Thackenbury.

"That would be one greeting less to exchange at 
Christmas," said Clovis.


THE DREAMER


IT was the season of sales.  The august 
establishment of Walpurgis and Nettlepink had lowered its 
prices for an entire week as a concession to trade 
observances, much as an Arch-duchess might protestingly 
contract an attack of influenza for the unsatisfactory 
reason that influenza was locally prevalent.  Adela 
Chemping, who considered herself in some measure superior 
to the allurements of an ordinary bargain sale, made a 
point of attending the reduction week at Walpurgis and 
Nettlepink's.

"I'm not a bargain hunter," she said, "but I like to 
go where bargains are."

Which showed that beneath her surface strength of 
character there flowed a gracious undercurrent of human 
weakness.

With a view to providing herself with a male escort 
Mrs. Chemping had invited her youngest nephew to 
accompany her on the first day of the shopping 
expedition, throwing in the additional allurement of a 
cinematograph theatre and the prospect of light 
refreshment.  As Cyprian was not yet eighteen she hoped 
he might not have reached that stage in masculine 
development when parcel-carrying is looked on as a thing 
abhorrent.

"Meet me just outside the floral department," she 
wrote to him, "and don't be a moment later than eleven."

Cyprian was a boy who carried with him through early 
life the wondering look of a dreamer, the eyes of one who 
sees things that are not visible to ordinary mortals, and 
invests the commonplace things of this world with 
qualities unsuspected by plainer folk - the eyes of a 
poet or a house agent.  He was quietly dressed - that 
sartorial quietude which frequently accompanies early 
adolescence, and is usually attributed by novel-writers 
to the influence of a widowed mother.  His hair was 
brushed back in a smoothness as of ribbon seaweed and 
seamed with a narrow furrow that scarcely aimed at being 
a parting.  His aunt particularly noted this item of his 
toilet when they met at the appointed rendezvous, because 
he was standing waiting for her bare-headed.

"Where is your hat?" she asked.

"I didn't bring one with me," he replied.

Adela Chemping was slightly scandalised.

"You are not going to be what they call a Nut, are 
you?" she inquired with some anxiety, partly with the 
idea that a Nut would be an extravagance which her 
sister's small household would scarcely be justified in 
incurring, partly, perhaps, with the instinctive 
apprehension that a Nut, even in its embryo stage, would 
refuse to carry parcels.

Cyprian looked at her with his wondering, dreamy 
eyes.

"I didn't bring a hat," he said, "because it is such 
a nuisance when one is shopping; I mean it is so awkward 
if one meets anyone one knows and has to take one's hat 
off when one's hands are full of parcels.  If one hasn't 
got a hat on one can't take it off."

Mrs. Chemping sighed with great relief; her worst 
fear had been laid at rest.

"It is more orthodox to wear a hat," she observed, 
and then turned her attention briskly to the business in 
hand.

"We will go first to the table-linen counter," she 
said, leading the way in that direction; "I should like 
to look at some napkins."

The wondering look deepened in Cyprian's eyes as he 
followed his aunt; he belonged to a generation that is 
supposed to be over-fond of the role of mere spectator, 
but looking at napkins that one did not mean to buy was a 
pleasure beyond his comprehension.  Mrs. Chemping held 
one or two napkins up to the light and stared fixedly at 
them, as though she half expected to find some 
revolutionary cypher written on them in scarcely visible 
ink; then she suddenly broke away in the direction of the 
glassware department.

"Millicent asked me to get her a couple of decanters 
if there were any going really cheap," she explained on 
the way, "and I really do want a salad bowl.  I can come 
back to the napkins later on."

She handled and scrutinised a large number of 
decanters and a long series of salad bowls, and finally 
bought seven chrysanthemum vases.

"No one uses that kind of vase nowadays," she 
informed Cyprian, "but they will do for presents next 
Christmas."

Two sunshades that were marked down to a price that 
Mrs. Chemping considered absurdly cheap were added to her 
purchases.

"One of them will do for Ruth Colson; she is going 
out to the Malay States, and a sunshade will always be 
useful there.  And I must get her some thin writing 
paper.  It takes up no room in one's baggage."

Mrs. Chemping bought stacks of writing paper; it was 
so cheap, and it went so flat in a trunk or portmanteau.  
She also bought a few envelopes - envelopes somehow 
seemed rather an extragavance compared with notepaper.

"Do you think Ruth will like blue or grey paper?" 
she asked Cyprian.

"Grey," said Cyprian, who had never met the lady in 
question.

"Have you any mauve notepaper of this quality?" 
Adela asked the assistant.

"We haven't any mauve," said the assistant, "but 
we've two shades of green and a darker shade of grey."

Mrs. Chemping inspected the greens and the darker 
grey, and chose the blue.

"Now we can have some lunch," she said.

Cyprian behaved in an exemplary fashion in the 
refreshment department, and cheerfully accepted a fish 
cake and a mince pie and a small cup of coffee as 
adequate restoratives after two hours of concentrated 
shopping.  He was adamant, however, in resisting his 
aunt's suggestion that a hat should be bought for him at 
the counter where men's headwear was being disposed of at 
temptingly reduced prices.

"I've got as many hats as I want at home," he said, 
"and besides, it rumples one's hair so, trying them on."

Perhaps he was going to develop into a Nut after 
all.  It was a disquieting symptom that he left all the 
parcels in charge of the cloak-room attendant.

"We shall be getting more parcels presently," he 
said, "so we need not collect these till we have finished 
our shopping."

His aunt was doubtfully appeased; some of the 
pleasure and excitement of a shopping expedition seemed 
to evaporate when one was deprived of immediate personal 
contact with one's purchases.

"I'm going to look at those napkins again," she 
said, as they descended the stairs to the ground floor.  
"You need not come," she added, as the dreaming look in 
the boy's eyes changed for a moment into one of mute 
protest, "you can meet me afterwards in the cutlery 
department; I've just remembered that I haven't a 
corkscrew in the house that can be depended on."

Cyprian was not to be found in the cutlery 
department when his aunt in due course arrived there, but 
in the crush and bustle of anxious shoppers and busy 
attendants it was an easy matter to miss anyone.  It was 
in the leather goods department some quarter of an hour 
later that Adela Chemping caught sight of her nephew, 
separated from her by a rampart of suit-cases and 
portmanteaux and hemmed in by the jostling crush of human 
beings that now invaded every corner of the great 
shopping emporium.  She was just in time to witness a 
pardonable but rather embarrassing mistake on the part of 
a lady who had wriggled her way with unstayable 
determination towards the bareheaded Cyprian, and was now 
breathlessly demanding the sale price of a handbag which 
had taken her fancy.

"There now," exclaimed Adela to herself, "she takes 
him for one of the shop assistants because he hasn't got 
a hat on.  I wonder it hasn't happened before."

Perhaps it had.  Cyprian, at any rate, seemed 
neither startled nor embarrassed by the error into which 
the good lady had fallen.  Examining the ticket on the 
bag, he announced in a clear, dispassionate voice:

"Black seal, thirty-four shillings, marked down to 
twenty-eight.  As a matter of fact, we are clearing them 
out at a special reduction price of twenty-six shillings.  
They are going off rather fast."

"I'll take it," said the lady, eagerly digging some 
coins out of her purse.

"Will you take it as it is?" asked Cyprian; "it will 
be a matter of a few minutes to get it wrapped up, there 
is such a crush."

"Never mind, I'll take it as it is," said the 
purchaser, clutching her treasure and counting the money 
into Cyprian's palm.

Several kind strangers helped Adela into the open 
air.

"It's the crush and the heat," said one sympathiser 
to another; "it's enough to turn anyone giddy."

When she next came across Cyprian he was standing in 
the crowd that pushed and jostled around the counters of 
the book department.  The dream look was deeper than ever 
in his eyes.  He had just sold two books of devotion to 
an elderly Canon.


THE QUINCE TREE


"I'VE just been to see old Betsy Mullen," announced 
Vera to her aunt, Mrs. Bebberly Cumble; "she seems in 
rather a bad way about her rent.  She owes about fifteen 
weeks of it, and says she doesn't know where any of it is 
to come from."

"Betsy Mullen always is in difficulties with her 
rent, and the more people help her with it the less she 
troubles about it," said the aunt.  "I certainly am not 
going to assist her any more.  The fact is, she will have 
to go into a smaller and cheaper cottage; there are 
several to be had at the other end of the village for 
half the rent that she is paying, or supposed to be 
paying, now.  I told her a year ago that she ought to 
move."

"But she wouldn't get such a nice garden anywhere 
else," protested Vera, "and there's such a jolly quince 
tree in the corner.  I don't suppose there's another 
quince tree in the whole parish.  And she never makes any 
quince jam; I think to have a quince tree and not to make 
quince jam shows such strength of character.  Oh, she 
can't possibly move away from that garden."

"When one is sixteen," said Mrs. Bebberly Cumble 
severely, "one talks of things being impossible which are 
merely uncongenial.  It is not only possible but it is 
desirable that Betsy Mullen should move into smaller 
quarters; she has scarcely enough furniture to fill that 
big cottage."

"As far as value goes," said Vera after a short 
pause, "there is more in Betsy's cottage than in any 
other house for miles round."

"Nonsense," said the aunt; "she parted with whatever 
old china ware she had long ago."

"I'm not talking about anything that belongs to 
Betsy herself," said Vera darkly; "but, of course, you 
don't know what I know, and I don't suppose I ought to 
tell you."

"You must tell me at once," exclaimed the aunt, her 
senses leaping into alertness like those of a terrier 
suddenly exchanging a bored drowsiness for the lively 
anticipation of an immediate rat hunt.

"I'm perfectly certain that I oughtn't to tell you 
anything about it," said Vera, "but, then, I often do 
things that I oughtn't to do."

"I should be the last person to suggest that you 
should do anything that you ought not to do to - " began 
Mrs. Bebberly Cumble impressively.

"And I am always swayed by the last person who 
speaks to me," admitted Vera, "so I'll do what I ought 
not to do and tell you."

Mrs. Bebberley Cumble thrust a very pardonable sense 
of exasperation into the background of her mind and 
demanded impatiently:

"What is there in Betsy Mullen's cottage that you 
are making such a fuss about?"

"It's hardly fair to say that I'VE made a fuss about 
it," said Vera; "this is the first time I've mentioned 
the matter, but there's been no end of trouble and 
mystery and newspaper speculation about it.  It's rather 
amusing to think of the columns of conjecture in the 
Press and the police and detectives hunting about 
everywhere at home and abroad, and all the while that 
innocent-looking little cottage has held the secret."

"You don't mean to say it's the Louvre picture, La 
Something or other, the woman with the smile, that 
disappeared about two years ago?" exclaimed the aunt with 
rising excitement.

"Oh no, not that," said Vera, "but something quite 
as important and just as mysterious - if anything, rather 
more scandalous."

"Not the Dublin - ?"

Vera nodded.

"The whole jolly lot of them."

"In Betsy's cottage?  Incredible!"

"Of course Betsy hasn't an idea as to what they 
are," said Vera; "she just knows that they are something 
valuable and that she must keep quiet about them.  I 
found out quite by accident what they were and how they 
came to be there.  You see, the people who had them were 
at their wits' end to know where to stow them away for 
safe keeping, and some one who was motoring through the 
village was struck by the snug loneliness of the cottage 
and thought it would be just the thing.  Mrs. Lamper 
arranged the matter with Betsy and smuggled the things 
in."

"Mrs. Lamper?"

"Yes; she does a lot of district visiting, you 
know."

"I am quite aware that she takes soup and flannel 
and improving literature to the poorer cottagers," said 
Mrs. Bebberly Cumble, "but that is hardly the same sort 
of thing as disposing of stolen goods, and she must have 
known something about their history; anyone who reads the 
papers, even casually, must have been aware of the theft, 
and I should think the things were not hard to recognise.  
Mrs. Lamper has always had the reputation of being a very 
conscientious woman."

"Of course she was screening some one else," said 
Vera.  "A remarkable feature of the affair is the 
extraordinary number of quite respectable people who have 
involved themselves in its meshes by trying to shield 
others.  You would be really astonished if you knew some 
of the names of the individuals mixed up in it, and I 
don't suppose a tithe of them know who the original 
culprits were; and now I've got you entangled in the mess 
by letting you into the secret of the cottage."

"You most certainly have not entangled me," said 
Mrs. Bebberly Cumble indignantly.  "I have no intention 
of shielding anybody.  The police must know about it at 
once; a theft is a theft, whoever is involved.  If 
respectable people choose to turn themselves into 
receivers and disposers of stolen goods, well, they've 
ceased to be respectable, that's all.  I shall telephone 
immediately - "

"Oh, aunt," said Vera reproachfully, "it would break 
the poor Canon's heart if Cuthbert were to be involved in 
a scandal of this sort.  You know it would."

"Cuthbert involved!  How can you say such things 
when you know how much we all think of him?"

"Of course I know you think a lot of him, and that 
he's engaged to marry Beatrice, and that it will be a 
frightfully good match, and that he's your ideal of what 
a son-in-law ought to be.  All the same, it was 
Cuthbert's idea to stow the things away in the cottage, 
and it was his motor that brought them.  He was only 
doing it to help his friend Pegginson, you know - the 
Quaker man, who is always agitating for a smaller Navy.  
I forget how he got involved in it.  I warned you that 
there were lots of quite respectable people mixed up in 
it, didn't I?  That's what I meant when I said it would 
be impossible for old Betsy to leave the cottage; the 
things take up a good bit of room, and she couldn't go 
carrying them about with her other goods and chattels 
without attracting notice.  Of course if she were to fall 
ill and die it would be equally unfortunate.  Her mother 
lived to be over ninety, she tells me, so with due care 
and an absence of worry she ought to last for another 
dozen years at least.  By that time perhaps some other 
arrangements will have been made for disposing of the 
wretched things."

"I shall speak to Cuthbert about it - after the 
wedding," said Mrs. Bebberly Cumble.

"The wedding isn't till next year," said Vera, in 
recounting the story to her best girl friend, "and 
meanwhile old Betsy is living rent free, with soup twice 
a week and my aunt's doctor to see her whenever she has a 
finger ache."

"But how on earth did you get to know about it all?" 
asked her friend, in admiring wonder.

"It was a mystery - " said Vera.

"Of course it was a mystery, a mystery that baffled 
everybody.  What beats me is how you found out - "

"Oh, about the jewels?  I invented that part," 
explained Vera; "I mean the mystery was where old Betsy's 
arrears of rent were to come from; and she would have 
hated leaving that jolly quince tree."


THE FORBIDDEN BUZZARDS


"IS matchmaking at all in your line?"

Hugo Peterby asked the question with a certain 
amount of personal interest.

"I don't specialise in it," said Clovis; "it's all 
right while you're doing it, but the after-effects are 
sometimes so disconcerting - the mute reproachful looks 
of the people you've aided and abetted in matrimonial 
experiments.  It's as bad as selling a man a horse with 
half a dozen latent vices and watching him discover them 
piecemeal in the course of the hunting season.  I suppose 
you're thinking of the Coulterneb girl.  She's certainly 
jolly, and quite all right as far as looks go, and I 
believe a certain amount of money adheres to her.  What I 
don't see is how you will ever manage to propose to her.  
In all the time I've known her I don't remember her to 
have stopped talking for three consecutive minutes.  
You'll have to race her six times round the grass paddock 
for a bet, and then blurt your proposal out before she's 
got her wind back.  The paddock is laid up for hay, but 
if you're really in love with her you won't let a 
consideration of that sort stop you, especially as it's 
not your hay."

"I think I could manage the proposing part right 
enough," said Hugo, "if I could count on being left alone 
with her for four or five hours.  The trouble is that I'm 
not likely to get anything like that amount of grace.  
That fellow Lanner is showing signs of interesting 
himself in the same quarter.  He's quite heartbreakingly 
rich and is rather a swell in his way; in fact, our 
hostess is obviously a bit flattered at having him here.  
If she gets wind of the fact that he's inclined to be 
attracted by Betty Coulterneb she'll think it a splendid 
match and throw them into each other's arms all day long, 
and then where will my opportunities come in?  My one 
anxiety is to keep him out of the girl's way as much as 
possible, and if you could help me - "

"If you want me to trot Lanner round the 
countryside, inspecting alleged Roman remains and 
studying local methods of bee culture and crop raising, 
I'm afraid I can't oblige you," said Clovis.  "You see, 
he's taken something like an aversion to me since the 
other night in the smoking-room."

"What happened in the smoking-room?"

"He trotted out some well-worn chestnut as the 
latest thing in good stories, and I remarked, quite 
innocently, that I never could remember whether it was 
George II. or James II. who was so fond of that 
particular story, and now he regards me with politely-
draped dislike.  I'll do my best for you, if the 
opportunity arises, but it will have to be in a 
roundabout, impersonal manner."


* * * *


"It's so nice having Mr. Lanner here," confided Mrs. 
Olston to Clovis the next afternoon; "he's always been 
engaged when I've asked him before.  Such a nice man; he 
really ought to be married to some nice girl.  Between 
you and me, I have an idea that he came down here for a 
certain reason."

"I've had much the same idea," said Clovis, lowering 
his voice; "in fact, I'm almost certain of it."

"You mean he's attracted by - " began Mrs. Olston 
eagerly.

"I mean he's here for what he can get," said Clovis.

"For what he can GET?" said the hostess with a touch 
of indignation in her voice; "what do you mean?  He's a 
very rich man.  What should he want to get here?"

"He has one ruling passion," said Clovis, "and 
there's something he can get here that is not to be had 
for love nor for money anywhere else in the country, as 
far as I know."

"But what?  Whatever do you mean?  What is his 
ruling passion?"

"Egg-collecting," said Clovis.  "He has agents all 
over the world getting rare eggs for him, and his 
collection is one of the finest in Europe; but his great 
ambition is to collect his treasures personally.  He 
stops at no expense nor trouble to achieve that end."

"Good heavens!  The buzzards, the rough-legged 
buzzards!" exclaimed Mrs. Olston; "you don't think he's 
going to raid their nest?"

"What do you think yourself?" asked Clovis; "the 
only pair of rough-legged buzzards known to breed in this 
country are nesting in your woods.  Very few people know 
about them, but as a member of the league for protecting 
rare birds that information would be at his disposal.  I 
came down in the train with him, and I noticed that a 
bulky volume of Dresser's 'Birds of Europe' was one of 
the requisites that he had packed in his travelling-kit.  
It was the volume dealing with short-winged hawks and 
buzzards."

Clovis believed that if a lie was worth telling it 
was worth telling well.

"This is appalling," said Mrs. Olston; "my husband 
would never forgive me if anything happened to those 
birds.  They've been seen about the woods for the last 
year or two, but this is the first time they've nested.  
As you say, they are almost the only pair known to be 
breeding in the whole of Great Britain; and now their 
nest is going to be harried by a guest staying under my 
roof.  I must do something to stop it.  Do you think if I 
appealed to him - "

Clovis laughed.

"There is a story going about, which I fancy is true 
in most of its details, of something that happened not 
long ago somewhere on the coast of the Sea of Marmora, in 
which our friend had a hand.  A Syrian nightjar, or some 
such bird, was known to be breeding in the olive gardens 
of a rich Armenian, who for some reason or other wouldn't 
allow Lanner to go in and take the eggs, though he 
offered cash down for the permission.  The Armenian was 
found beaten nearly to death a day or two later, and his 
fences levelled.  It was assumed to be a case of 
Mussulman aggression, and noted as such in all the 
Consular reports, but the eggs are in the Lanner 
collection.  No, I don't think I should appeal to his 
better feelings if I were you."

"I must do something," said Mrs. Olston tearfully; 
"my husband's parting words when he went off to Norway 
were an injunction to see that those birds were not 
disturbed, and he's asked about them every time he's 
written.  Do suggest something."

"I was going to suggest picketing," said Clovis.

"Picketing!  You mean setting guards round the 
birds?"

"No; round Lanner.  He can't find his way through 
those woods by night, and you could arrange that you or 
Evelyn or Jack or the German governess should be by his 
side in relays all day long.  A fellow guest he could get 
rid of, but he couldn't very well shake off members of 
the household, and even the most determined collector 
would hardly go climbing after forbidden buzzards' eggs 
with a German governess hanging round his neck, so to 
speak."

Lanner, who had been lazily watching for an 
opportunity for prosecuting his courtship of the 
Coulterneb girl, found presently that his chances of 
getting her to himself for ten minutes even were non-
existent.  If the girl was ever alone he never was.  His 
hostess had changed suddenly, as far as he was concerned, 
from the desirable type that lets her guests do nothing 
in the way that best pleases them, to the sort that drags 
them over the ground like so many harrows.  She showed 
him the herb garden and the greenhouses, the village 
church, some water-colour sketches that her sister had 
done in Corsica, and the place where it was hoped that 
celery would grow later in the year.

He was shown all the Aylesbury ducklings and the row 
of wooden hives where there would have been bees if there 
had not been bee disease.  He was also taken to the end 
of a long lane and shown a distant mound whereon local 
tradition reported that the Danes had once pitched a 
camp.  And when his hostess had to desert him temporarily 
for other duties he would find Evelyn walking solemnly by 
his side.  Evelyn was fourteen and talked chiefly about 
good and evil, and of how much one might accomplish in 
the way of regenerating the world if one was thoroughly 
determined to do one's utmost.  It was generally rather a 
relief when she was displaced by Jack, who was nine years 
old, and talked exclusively about the Balkan War without 
throwing any fresh light on its political or military 
history.  The German governess told Lanner more about 
Schiller than he had ever heard in his life about any one 
person; it was perhaps his own fault for having told her 
that he was not interested in Goethe.  When the governess 
went off picket duty the hostess was again on hand with a 
not-to-be-gainsaid invitation to visit the cottage of an 
old woman who remembered Charles James Fox; the woman had 
been dead for two or three years, but the cottage was 
still there.  Lanner was called back to town earlier than 
he had originally intended.

Hugo did not bring off his affair with Betty 
Coulterneb.  Whether she refused him or whether, as was 
more generally supposed, he did not get a chance of 
saying three consecutive words, has never been exactly 
ascertained.  Anyhow, she is still the jolly Coulterneb 
girl.

The buzzards successfully reared two young ones, 
which were shot by a local hairdresser.


THE STAKE


"RONNIE is a great trial to me," said Mrs. Attray 
plaintively.  "Only eighteen years old last February and 
already a confirmed gambler.  I am sure I don't know 
where he inherits it from; his father never touched 
cards, and you know how little I play - a game of bridge 
on Wednesday afternoons in the winter, for three-pence a 
hundred, and even that I shouldn't do if it wasn't that 
Edith always wants a fourth and would be certain to ask 
that detestable Jenkinham woman if she couldn't get me.  
I would much rather sit and talk any day than play 
bridge; cards are such a waste of time, I think.  But as 
to Ronnie, bridge and baccarat and poker-patience are 
positively all that he thinks about.  Of course I've done 
my best to stop it; I've asked the Norridrums not to let 
him play cards when he's over there, but you might as 
well ask the Atlantic Ocean to keep quiet for a crossing 
as expect them to bother about a mother's natural 
anxieties."

"Why do you let him go there?" asked Eleanor 
Saxelby.

"My dear," said Mrs. Attray, "I don't want to offend 
them. After all, they are my landlords and I have to look 
to them for anything I want done about the place; they 
were very accommodating about the new roof for the orchid 
house.  And they lend me one of their cars when mine is 
out of order; you know how often it gets out of order."

"I don't know how often," said Eleanor, "but it must 
happen very frequently.  Whenever I want you to take me 
anywhere in your car I am always told that there is 
something wrong with it, or else that the chauffeur has 
got neuralgia and you don't like to ask him to go out."

"He suffers quite a lot from neuralgia," said Mrs. 
Attray hastily.  "Anyhow," she continued, "you can 
understand that I don't want to offend the Norridrums.  
Their household is the most rackety one in the county, 
and I believe no one ever knows to an hour or two when 
any particular meal will appear on the table or what it 
will consist of when it does appear."

Eleanor Saxelby shuddered.  She liked her meals to 
be of regular occurrence and assured proportions.

"Still," pursued Mrs. Attray, "whatever their own 
home life may be, as landlords and neighbours they are 
considerate and obliging, so I don't want to quarrel with 
them.  Besides, if Ronnie didn't play cards there he'd be 
playing somewhere else."

"Not if you were firm with him," said Eleanor "I 
believe in being firm."

"Firm?  I am firm," exclaimed Mrs. Attray; "I am 
more than firm - I am farseeing.  I've done everything I 
can think of to prevent Ronnie from playing for money.  
I've stopped his allowance for the rest of the year, so 
he can't even gamble on credit, and I've subscribed a 
lump sum to the church offertory in his name instead of 
giving him instalments of small silver to put in the bag 
on Sundays.  I wouldn't even let him have the money to 
tip the hunt servants with, but sent it by postal order.  
He was furiously sulky about it, but I reminded him of 
what happened to the ten shillings that I gave him for 
the Young Men's Endeavour League 'Self-Denial Week.' "

"What did happen to it?" asked Eleanor.

"Well, Ronnie did some preliminary endeavouring with 
it, on his own account, in connection with the Grand 
National.  If it had come off, as he expressed it, he 
would have given the League twenty-five shillings and 
netted a comfortable commission for himself; as it was, 
that ten shillings was one of the things the League had 
to deny itself.  Since then I've been careful not to let 
him have a penny piece in his hands."

"He'll get round that in some way," said Eleanor 
with quiet conviction; "he'll sell things."

"My dear, he's done all that is to be done in that 
direction already.  He's got rid of his wrist-watch and 
his hunting flask and both his cigarette cases, and I 
shouldn't be surprised if he's wearing imitation-gold 
sleeve links instead of those his Aunt Rhoda gave him on 
his seventeenth birthday.  He can't sell his clothes, of 
course, except his winter overcoat, and I've locked that 
up in the camphor cupboard on the pretext of preserving 
it from moth.  I really don't see what else he can raise 
money on.  I consider that I've been both firm and far-
seeing."

"Has he been at the Norridrums lately?" asked 
Eleanor.

"He was there yesterday afternoon and stayed to 
dinner," said Mrs. Attray.  "I don't quite know when he 
came home, but I fancy it was late."

"Then depend on it he was gambling," said Eleanor, 
with the assured air of one who has few ideas and makes 
the most of them.  " Late hours in the country always 
mean gambling."

"He can't gamble if he has no money and no chance of 
getting any," argued Mrs. Attray; "even if one plays for 
small stakes one must have a decent prospect of paying 
one's losses."

"He may have sold some of the Amherst pheasant 
chicks," suggested Eleanor; "they would fetch about ten 
or twelve shillings each, I daresay."

"Ronnie wouldn't do such a thing," said Mrs. Attray; 
"and anyhow I went and counted them this morning and 
they're all there.  No," she continued, with the quiet 
satisfaction that comes from a sense of painstaking and 
merited achievement, "I fancy that Ronnie had to content 
himself with the role of onlooker last night, as far as 
the card-table was concerned."

"Is that clock right?" asked Eleanor, whose eyes had 
been straying restlessly towards the mantel-piece for 
some little time; "lunch is usually so punctual in your 
establishment."

"Three minutes past the half-hour," exclaimed Mrs. 
Attray; "cook must be preparing something unusually 
sumptuous in your honour.  I am not in the secret; I've 
been out all the morning, you know."

Eleanor smiled forgivingly.  A special effort by 
Mrs. Attray's cook was worth waiting a few minutes for.

As a matter of fact, the luncheon fare, when it made 
its tardy appearance, was distinctly unworthy of the 
reputation which the justly-treasured cook had built up 
for herself.  The soup alone would have sufficed to cast 
a gloom over any meal that it had inaugurated, and it was 
not redeemed by anything that followed.  Eleanor said 
little, but when she spoke there was a hint of tears in 
her voice that was far more eloquent than outspoken 
denunciation would have been, and even the insouciant 
Ronald showed traces of depression when he tasted the 
rognons Saltikoff.

"Not quite the best luncheon I've enjoyed in your 
house," said Eleanor at last, when her final hope had 
flickered out with the savoury.

"My dear, it's the worst meal I've sat down to for 
years," said her hostess; "that last dish tasted 
principally of red pepper and wet toast.  I'm awfully 
sorry.  Is anything the matter in the kitchen, Pellin?" 
she asked of the attendant maid.

"Well, ma'am, the new cook hadn't hardly time to see 
to things properly, coming in so sudden - " commenced 
Pellin by way of explanation.

"The new cook!" screamed Mrs. Attray.

"Colonel Norridrum's cook, ma'am," said Pellin.

"What on earth do you mean?  What is Colonel 
Norridrum's cook doing in my kitchen - and where is my 
cook?"

"Perhaps I can explain better than Pellin can," said 
Ronald hurriedly; "the fact is, I was dining at the 
Norridrums' yesterday, and they were wishing they had a 
swell cook like yours, just for to-day and to-morrow, 
while they've got some gourmet staying with them: their 
own cook is no earthly good - well, you've seen what she 
turns out when she's at all flurried.  So I thought it 
would be rather sporting to play them at baccarat for the 
loan of our cook against a money stake, and I lost, 
that's all.  I have had rotten luck at baccarat all this 
year."

The remainder of his explanation, of how he had 
assured the cooks that the temporary transfer had his 
mother's sanction, and had smuggled the one out and the 
other in during the maternal absence, was drowned in the 
outcry of scandalised upbraiding.

"If I had sold the woman into slavery there couldn't 
have been a bigger fuss about it," he confided afterwards 
to Bertie Norridrum, "and Eleanor Saxelby raged and 
ramped the louder of the two.  I tell you what, I'll bet 
you two of the Amherst pheasants to five shillings that 
she refuses to have me as a partner at the croquet 
tournament.  We're drawn together, you know."

This time he won his bet.


CLOVIS ON PARENTAL RESPONSIBILITIES


MARION EGGELBY sat talking to Clovis on the only 
subject that she ever willingly talked about - her 
offspring and their varied perfections and 
accomplishments. Clovis was not in what could be called a 
receptive mood; the younger generation of Eggelby, 
depicted in the glowing improbable colours of parent 
impressionism, aroused in him no enthusiasm.  Mrs. 
Eggelby, on the other hand, was furnished with enthusiasm 
enough for two.

"You would like Eric," she said, argumentatively 
rather than hopefully.  Clovis had intimated very 
unmistakably that he was unlikely to care extravagantly 
for either Amy or Willie.  "Yes, I feel sure you would 
like Eric.  Every one takes to him at once.  You know, he 
always reminds me of that famous picture of the youthful 
David - I forget who it's by, but it's very well known."

"That would be sufficient to set me against him, if 
I saw much of him," said Clovis.  "Just imagine at 
auction bridge, for instance, when one was trying to 
concentrate one's mind on what one's partner's original 
declaration had been, and to remember what suits one's 
opponents had originally discarded, what it would be like 
to have some one persistently reminding one of a picture 
of the youthful David.  It would be simply maddening.  If 
Eric did that I should detest him."

"Eric doesn't play bridge," said Mrs. Eggelby with 
dignity.

"Doesn't he?" asked Clovis; "why not?"

"None of my children have been brought up to play 
card games," said Mrs. Eggelby; "draughts and halma and 
those sorts of games I encourage.  Eric is considered 
quite a wonderful draughts-player."

"You are strewing dreadful risks in the path of your 
family," said Clovis; "a friend of mine who is a prison 
chaplain told me that among the worst criminal cases that 
have come under his notice, men condemned to death or to 
long periods of penal servitude, there was not a single 
bridge-player.  On the other hand, he knew at least two 
expert draughts-players among them."

"I really don't see what my boys have got to do with 
the criminal classes," said Mrs. Eggelby resentfully.  
"They have been most carefully brought up, I can assure 
you that."

"That shows that you were nervous as to how they 
would turn out," said Clovis.  "Now, my mother never 
bothered about bringing me up.  She just saw to it that I 
got whacked at decent intervals and was taught the 
difference between right and wrong; there is some 
difference, you know, but I've forgotten what it is."

"Forgotten the difference between right and wrong!" 
exclaimed Mrs. Eggelby.

"Well, you see, I took up natural history and a 
whole lot of other subjects at the same time, and one 
can't remember everything, can one?  I used to know the 
difference between the Sardinian dormouse and the 
ordinary kind, and whether the wry-neck arrives at our 
shores earlier than the cuckoo, or the other way round, 
and how long the walrus takes in growing to maturity; I 
daresay you knew all those sorts of things once, but I 
bet you've forgotten them."

"Those things are not important," said Mrs. Eggelby, 
"but - "

"The fact that we've both forgotten them proves that 
they are important," said Clovis; "you must have noticed 
that it's always the important things that one forgets, 
while the trivial, unnecessary facts of life stick in 
one's memory.  There's my cousin, Editha Clubberley, for 
instance; I can never forget that her birthday is on the 
12th of October.  It's a matter of utter indifference to 
me on what date her birthday falls, or whether she was 
born at all; either fact seems to me absolutely trivial, 
or unnecessary - I've heaps of other cousins to go on 
with.  On the other hand, when I'm staying with 
Hildegarde Shrubley I can never remember the important 
circumstance whether her first husband got his unenviable 
reputation on the Turf or the Stock Exchange, and that 
uncertainty rules Sport and Finance out of the 
conversation at once.  One can never mention travel, 
either, because her second husband had to live 
permanently abroad."

"Mrs. Shrubley and I move in very different 
circles," said Mrs. Eggelby stiffly.

"No one who knows Hildegarde could possibly accuse 
her of moving in a circle," said Clovis; "her view of 
life seems to be a non-stop run with an inexhaustible 
supply of petrol.  If she can get some one else to pay 
for the petrol so much the better.  I don't mind 
confessing to you that she has taught me more than any 
other woman I can think of."

"What kind of knowledge?" demanded Mrs. Eggelby, 
with the air a jury might collectively wear when finding 
a verdict without leaving the box.

"Well, among other things, she's introduced me to at 
least four different ways of cooking lobster," said 
Clovis gratefully.  "That, of course, wouldn't appeal to 
you; people who abstain from the pleasures of the card-
table never really appreciate the finer possibilities of 
the dining-table.  I suppose their powers of enlightened 
enjoyment get atrophied from disuse."

"An aunt of mine was very ill after eating a 
lobster," said Mrs. Eggelby.

"I daresay, if we knew more of her history, we 
should find out that she'd often been ill before eating 
the lobster.  Aren't you concealing the fact that she'd 
had measles and influenza and nervous headache and 
hysteria, and other things that aunts do have, long 
before she ate the lobster?  Aunts that have never known 
a day's illness are very rare; in fact, I don't 
personally know of any.  Of course if she ate it as a 
child of two weeks old it might have been her first 
illness - and her last.  But if that was the case I think 
you should have said so."

"I must be going," said Mrs. Eggelby, in a tone 
which had been thoroughly sterilised of even perfunctory 
regret.

Clovis rose with an air of graceful reluctance.

"I have so enjoyed our little talk about Eric," he 
said; "I quite look forward to meeting him some day."

"Good-bye," said Mrs. Eggelby frostily; the 
supplementary remark which she made at the back of her 
throat was -

"I'll take care that you never shall!"


A HOLIDAY TASK


KENELM JERTON entered the dining-hall of the Golden 
Galleon Hotel in the full crush of the luncheon hour.  
Nearly every seat was occupied, and small additional 
tables had been brought in, where floor space permitted, 
to accommodate latecomers, with the result that many of 
the tables were almost touching each other.  Jerton was 
beckoned by a waiter to the only vacant table that was 
discernible, and took his seat with the uncomfortable and 
wholly groundless idea that nearly every one in the room 
was staring at him.  He was a youngish man of ordinary 
appearance, quiet of dress and unobtrusive of manner, and 
he could never wholly rid himself of the idea that a 
fierce light of public scrutiny beat on him as though he 
had been a notability or a super-nut.  After he had 
ordered his lunch there came the unavoidable interval of 
waiting, with nothing to do but to stare at the flower-
vase on his table and to be stared at (in imagination) by 
several flappers, some maturer beings of the same sex, 
and a satirical-looking Jew.  In order to carry off the 
situation with some appearance of unconcern he became 
spuriously interested in the contents of the flower-vase.

"What is the name of these roses, d'you know?" he 
asked the waiter.  The waiter was ready at all times to 
conceal his ignorance concerning items of the wine-list 
or menu; he was frankly ignorant as to the specific name 
of the roses.

"AMY SYLVESTER PARTINGLON," said a voice at Jerton's 
elbow.

The voice came from a pleasant-faced, well-dressed 
young woman who was sitting at a table that almost 
touched Jerton's.  He thanked her hurriedly and nervously 
for the information, and made some inconsequent remark 
about the flowers.

"It is a curious thing," said the young woman, that, 
"I should be able to tell you the name of those roses 
without an effort of memory, because if you were to ask 
me my name I should be utterly unable to give it to you."

Jerton had not harboured the least intention of 
extending his thirst for name-labels to his neighbour.  
After her rather remarkable announcement, however, he was 
obliged to say something in the way of polite inquiry.

"Yes," answered the lady, "I suppose it is a case of 
partial loss of memory.  I was in the train coming down 
here; my ticket told me that I had come from Victoria and 
was bound for this place.  I had a couple of five-pound 
notes and a sovereign on me, no visiting cards or any 
other means of identification, and no idea as to who I 
am.  I can only hazily recollect that I have a title; I 
am Lady Somebody - beyond that my mind is a blank."

"Hadn't you any luggage with you?" asked Jerton.

"That is what I didn't know.  I knew the name of 
this hotel and made up my mind to come here, and when the 
hotel porter who meets the trains asked if I had any 
luggage I had to invent a dressing-bag and dress-basket; 
I could always pretend that they had gone astray.  I gave 
him the name of Smith, and presently he emerged from a 
confused pile of luggage and passengers with a dressing-
bag and dress-basket labelled Kestrel-Smith.  I had to 
take them; I don't see what else I could have done."

Jerton said nothing, but he rather wondered what the 
lawful owner of the baggage would do.

"Of course it was dreadful arriving at a strange 
hotel with the name of Kestrel-Smith, but it would have 
been worse to have arrived without luggage.  Anyhow, I 
hate causing trouble."

Jerton had visions of harassed railway officials and 
distraught Kestrel-Smiths, but he made no attempt to 
clothe his mental picture in words.  The lady continued 
her story.

"Naturally, none of my keys would fit the things, 
but I told an intelligent page boy that I had lost my 
key-ring, and he had the locks forced in a twinkling.  
Rather too intelligent, that boy; he will probably end in 
Dartmoor.  The Kestrel-Smith toilet tools aren't up to 
much, but they are better than nothing."

"If you feel sure that you have a title," said 
Jerton, " why not get hold of a peerage and go right 
through it?"

"I tried that.  I skimmed through the list of the 
House of Lords in 'Whitaker,' but a mere printed string 
of names conveys awfully little to one, you know.  If you 
were an army officer and had lost your identity you might 
pore over the Army List for months without finding out 
who your were.  I'm going on another tack; I'm trying to 
find out by various little tests who I am NOT - that will 
narrow the range of uncertainty down a bit.  You may have 
noticed, for instance, that I'm lunching principally off 
lobster Newburg."

Jerton had not ventured to notice anything of the 
sort.

"It's an extravagance, because it's one of the most 
expensive dishes on the menu, but at any rate it proves 
that I'm not Lady Starping; she never touches shell-fish, 
and poor Lady Braddleshrub has no digestion at all; if I 
am HER I shall certainly die in agony in the course of 
the afternoon, and the duty of finding out who I am will 
devolve on the press and the police and those sort of 
people; I shall be past caring.  Lady Knewford doesn't 
know one rose from another and she hates men, so she 
wouldn't have spoken to you in any case; and Lady 
Mousehilton flirts with every man she meets - I haven't 
flirted with you, have I?"

Jerton hastily gave the required assurance.

"Well, you see," continued the lady, "that knocks 
four off the list at once."

"It'll be rather a lengthy process bringing the list 
down to one," said Jerton.

"Oh, but, of course, there are heaps of them that I 
couldn't possibly be - women who've got grandchildren or 
sons old enough to have celebrated their coming of age.  
I've only got to consider the ones about my own age.  I 
tell you how you might help me this afternoon, if you 
don't mind; go through any of the back numbers of COUNTRY 
LIFE and those sort of papers that you can find in the 
smoking-room, and see if you come across my portrait with 
infant son or anything of that sort.  It won't take you 
ten minutes.  I'll meet you in the lounge about tea-time.  
Thanks awfully."

And the Fair Unknown, having graciously pressed 
Jerton into the search for her lost identity, rose and 
left the room.  As she passed the young man's table she 
halted for a moment and whispered:

"Did you notice that I tipped the waiter a shilling?  
We can cross Lady Ulwight off the list; she would have 
died rather than do that."

At five o'clock Jerton made his way to the hotel 
lounge; he had spent a diligent but fruitless quarter of 
an hour among the illustrated weeklies in the smoking-
room.  His new acquaintance was seated at a small tea-
table, with a waiter hovering in attendance.

"China tea or Indian?" she asked as Jerton came up.

"China, please, and nothing to eat.  Have you 
discovered anything?"

"Only negative information.  I'm not Lady Befnal.  
She disapproves dreadfully of any form of gambling, so 
when I recognised a well-known book maker in the hotel 
lobby I went and put a tenner on an unnamed filly by 
William the Third out of Mitrovitza for the three-fifteen 
race.  I suppose the fact of the animal being nameless 
was what attracted me."

Did it win?" asked Jerton.

"No, came in fourth, the most irritating thing a 
horse can do when you've backed it win or place.  Anyhow, 
I know now that I'm not Lady Befnal."

"It seems to me that the knowledge was rather dearly 
bought," commented Jerton.

"Well, yes, it has rather cleared me out," admitted 
the identity-seeker; "a florin is about all I've got left 
on me.  The lobster Newburg made my lunch rather an 
expensive one, and, of course, I had to tip that boy for 
what he did to the Kestrel-Smith locks.  I've got rather 
a useful idea, though.  I feel certain that I belong to 
the Pivot Club; I'll go back to town and ask the hall 
porter there if there are any letters for me.  He knows 
all the members by sight, and if there are any letters or 
telephone messages waiting for me of course that will 
solve the problem.  If he says there aren't any I shall 
say: 'You know who I am, don't you?' so I'll find out 
anyway."

The plan seemed a sound one; a difficulty in its 
execution suggested itself to Jerton.

"Of course," said the lady, when he hinted at the 
obstacle, "there's my fare back to town, and my bill here 
and cabs and things.  If you'll lend me three pounds that 
ought to see me through comfortably.  Thanks ever so.  
Then there is the question of that luggage: I don't want 
to be saddled with that for the rest of my life.  I'll 
have it brought down to the hall and you can pretend to 
mount guard over it while I'm writing a letter.  Then I 
shall just slip away to the station, and you can wander 
off to the smoking-room, and they can do what they like 
with the things.  They'll advertise them after a bit and 
the owner can claim them."

Jerton acquiesced in the manoeuvre, and duly mounted 
guard over the luggage while its temporary owner slipped 
unobtrusively out of the hotel.  Her departure was not, 
however, altogether unnoticed.  Two gentlemen were 
strolling past Jerton, and one of them remarked to the 
other:

"Did you see that tall young woman in grey who went 
out just now?  She is the Lady - "

His promenade carried him out of earshot at the 
critical moment when he was about to disclose the elusive 
identity.  The Lady Who?  Jerton could scarcely run after 
a total stranger, break into his conversation, and ask 
him for information concerning a chance passer-by.  
Besides, it was desirable that he should keep up the 
appearance of looking after the luggage.  In a minute or 
two, however, the important personage, the man who knew, 
came strolling back alone.  Jerton summoned up all his 
courage and waylaid him.

"I think I heard you say you knew the lady who went 
out of the hotel a few minutes ago, a tall lady, dressed 
in grey.  Excuse me for asking if you could tell me her 
name; I've been talking to her for half an hour; she - er 
- she knows all my people and seems to know me, so I 
suppose I've met her somewhere before, but I'm blest if I 
can put a name to her.  Could you - ?"

"Certainly.  She's a Mrs. Stroope."

"MRS.?" queried Jerton.

"Yes, she's the Lady Champion at golf in my part of 
the world.  An awful good sort, and goes about a good 
deal in Society, but she has an awkward habit of losing 
her memory every now and then, and gets into all sorts of 
fixes.  She's furious, too, if you make any allusion to 
it afterwards.  Good day, sir."

The stranger passed on his way, and before Jerton 
had had time to assimilate his information he found his 
whole attention centred on an angry-looking lady who was 
making loud and fretful-seeming inquiries of the hotel 
clerks.

"Has any luggage been brought here from the station 
by mistake, a dress-basket and dressing-case, with the 
name Kestrel-Smith?  It can't be traced anywhere.  I saw 
it put in at Victoria, that I'll swear.  Why - there is 
my luggage! and the locks have been tampered with!"

Jerton heard no more.  He fled down to the Turkish 
bath, and stayed there for hours.


THE STALLED OX


THEOPHIL ESHLEY was an artist by profession, a 
cattle painter by force of environment.  It is not to be 
supposed that he lived on a ranche or a dairy farm, in an 
atmosphere pervaded with horn and hoof, milking-stool, 
and branding-iron.  His home was in a park-like, villa-
dotted district that only just escaped the reproach of 
being suburban.  On one side of his garden there abutted 
a small, picturesque meadow, in which an enterprising 
neighbour pastured some small picturesque cows of the 
Channel Island persuasion.  At noonday in summertime the 
cows stood knee-deep in tall meadow-grass under the shade 
of a group of walnut trees, with the sunlight falling in 
dappled patches on their mouse-sleek coats.  Eshley had 
conceived and executed a dainty picture of two reposeful 
milch-cows in a setting of walnut tree and meadow-grass 
and filtered sunbeam, and the Royal Academy had duly 
exposed the same on the walls of its Summer Exhibition.  
The Royal Academy encourages orderly, methodical habits 
in its children.  Eshley had painted a successful and 
acceptable picture of cattle drowsing picturesquely under 
walnut trees, and as he had begun, so, of necessity, he 
went on.  His "Noontide Peace," a study of two dun cows 
under a walnut tree, was followed by "A Mid-day 
Sanctuary," a study of a walnut tree, with two dun cows 
under it.  In due succession there came "Where the Gad-
Flies Cease from Troubling," "The Haven of the Herd," and 
"A-dream in Dairyland," studies of walnut trees and dun 
cows.  His two attempts to break away from his own 
tradition were signal failures: "Turtle Doves alarmed by 
Sparrow-hawk" and "Wolves on the Roman Campagna" came 
back to his studio in the guise of abominable heresies, 
and Eshley climbed back into grace and the public gaze 
with "A Shaded Nook where Drowsy Milkers Dream."

On a fine afternoon in late autumn he was putting 
some finishing touches to a study of meadow weeds when 
his neighbour, Adela Pingsford, assailed the outer door 
of his studio with loud peremptory knockings.

"There is an ox in my garden," she announced, in 
explanation of the tempestuous intrusion.

"An ox," said Eshley blankly, and rather fatuously; 
"what kind of ox?"

"Oh, I don't know what kind," snapped the lady.  "A 
common or garden ox, to use the slang expression.  It is 
the garden part of it that I object to.  My garden has 
just been put straight for the winter, and an ox roaming 
about in it won't improve matters.  Besides, there are 
the chrysanthemums just coming into flower."

"How did it get into the garden?" asked Eshley.

"I imagine it came in by the gate," said the lady 
impatiently; "it couldn't have climbed the walls, and I 
don't suppose anyone dropped it from an aeroplane as a 
Bovril advertisement.  The immediately important question 
is not how it got in, but how to get it out."

"Won't it go?" said Eshley.

"If it was anxious to go," said Adela Pingsford 
rather angrily, "I should not have come here to chat with 
you about it.  I'm practically all alone; the housemaid 
is having her afternoon out and the cook is lying down 
with an attack of neuralgia.  Anything that I may have 
learned at school or in after life about how to remove a 
large ox from a small garden seems to have escaped from 
my memory now.  All I could think of was that you were a 
near neighbour and a cattle painter, presumably more or 
less familiar with the subjects that you painted, and 
that you might be of some slight assistance.  Possibly I 
was mistaken."

"I paint dairy cows, certainly," admitted Eshley, 
"but I cannot claim to have had any experience in 
rounding-up stray oxen.  I've seen it done on a cinema 
film, of course, but there were always horses and lots of 
other accessories; besides, one never knows how much of 
those pictures are faked."

Adela Pingsford said nothing, but led the way to her 
garden.  It was normally a fair-sized garden, but it 
looked small in comparison with the ox, a huge mottled 
brute, dull red about the head and shoulders, passing to 
dirty white on the flanks and hind-quarters, with shaggy 
ears and large blood-shot eyes.  It bore about as much 
resemblance to the dainty paddock heifers that Eshley was 
accustomed to paint as the chief of a Kurdish nomad clan 
would to a Japanese tea-shop girl.  Eshley stood very 
near the gate while he studied the animal's appearance 
and demeanour.  Adela Pingsford continued to say nothing.

"It's eating a chrysanthemum," said Eshley at last, 
when the silence had become unbearable.

"How observant you are," said Adela bitterly.  "You 
seem to notice everything.  As a matter of fact, it has 
got six chrysanthemums in its mouth at the present 
moment."

The necessity for doing something was becoming 
imperative.  Eshley took a step or two in the direction 
of the animal, clapped his hands, and made noises of the 
"Hish" and "Shoo" variety.  If the ox heard them it gave 
no outward indication of the fact.

"If any hens should ever stray into my garden," said 
Adela, "I should certainly send for you to frighten them 
out.  You 'shoo' beautifully.  Meanwhile, do you mind 
trying to drive that ox away?  That is a MADEMOISELLE 
LOUISE BICHOT that he's begun on now," she added in icy 
calm, as a glowing orange head was crushed into the huge 
munching mouth.

"Since you have been so frank about the variety of 
the chrysanthemum," said Eshley, "I don't mind telling 
you that this is an Ayrshire ox."

The icy calm broke down; Adela Pingsford used 
language that sent the artist instinctively a few feet 
nearer to the ox.  He picked up a pea-stick and flung it 
with some determination against the animal's mottled 
flanks.  The operation of mashing MADEMOISELLE LOUISE 
BICHOT into a petal salad was suspended for a long 
moment, while the ox gazed with concentrated inquiry at 
the stick-thrower.  Adela gazed with equal concentration 
and more obvious hostility at the same focus.  As the 
beast neither lowered its head nor stamped its feet 
Eshley ventured on another javelin exercise with another 
pea-stick.  The ox seemed to realise at once that it was 
to go; it gave a hurried final pluck at the bed where the 
chrysanthemums had been, and strode swiftly up the 
garden.  Eshley ran to head it towards the gate, but only 
succeeded in quickening its pace from a walk to a 
lumbering trot.  With an air of inquiry, but with no real 
hesitation, it crossed the tiny strip of turf that the 
charitable called the croquet lawn, and pushed its way 
through the open French window into the morning-room.  
Some chrysanthemums and other autumn herbage stood about 
the room in vases, and the animal resumed its browsing 
operations; all the same, Eshley fancied that the 
beginnings of a hunted look had come into its eyes, a 
look that counselled respect.  He discontinued his 
attempt to interfere with its choice of surroundings.

"Mr. Eshley," said Adela in a shaking voice, "I 
asked you to drive that beast out of my garden, but I did 
not ask you to drive it into my house.  If I must have it 
anywhere on the premises I prefer the garden to the 
morning-room."

"Cattle drives are not in my line," said Eshley; "if 
I remember I told you so at the outset."  "I quite 
agree," retorted the lady, "painting pretty pictures of 
pretty little cows is what you're suited for.  Perhaps 
you'd like to do a nice sketch of that ox making itself 
at home in my morning-room?"

This time it seemed as if the worm had turned; 
Eshley began striding away.

"Where are you going?" screamed Adela.

"To fetch implements," was the answer.

"Implements?  I won't have you use a lasso.  The 
room will be wrecked if there's a struggle."

But the artist marched out of the garden.  In a 
couple of minutes he returned, laden with easel, 
sketching-stool, and painting materials.

"Do you mean to say that you're going to sit quietly 
down and paint that brute while it's destroying my 
morning-room?" gasped Adela.

"It was your suggestion," said Eshley, setting his 
canvas in position.

"I forbid it; I absolutely forbid it!" stormed 
Adela.

"I don't see what standing you have in the matter," 
said the artist; "you can hardly pretend that it's your 
ox, even by adoption."

"You seem to forget that it's in my morning-room, 
eating my flowers," came the raging retort.

"You seem to forget that the cook has neuralgia," 
said Eshley; "she may be just dozing off into a merciful 
sleep and your outcry will waken her.  Consideration for 
others should be the guiding principle of people in our 
station of life."

"The man is mad!" exclaimed Adela tragically.  A 
moment later it was Adela herself who appeared to go mad.  
The ox had finished the vase-flowers and the cover of 
"Israel Kalisch," and appeared to be thinking of leaving 
its rather restricted quarters.  Eshley noticed its 
restlessness and promptly flung it some bunches of 
Virginia creeper leaves as an inducement to continue the 
sitting.

"I forget how the proverb runs," he observed; of 
something about 'better a dinner of herbs than a stalled 
ox where hate is.'  We seem to have all the ingredients 
for the proverb ready to hand."

"I shall go to the Public Library and get them to 
telephone for the police," announced Adela, and, raging 
audibly, she departed.

Some minutes later the ox, awakening probably to the 
suspicion that oil cake and chopped mangold was waiting 
for it in some appointed byre, stepped with much 
precaution out of the morning-room, stared with grave 
inquiry at the no longer obtrusive and pea-stick-throwing 
human, and then lumbered heavily but swiftly out of the 
garden.  Eshley packed up his tools and followed the 
animal's example and "Larkdene" was left to neuralgia and 
the cook.

The episode was the turning-point in Eshley's 
artistic career.  His remarkable picture, "Ox in a 
morning-room, late autumn," was one of the sensations and 
successes of the next Paris Salon, and when it was 
subsequently exhibited at Munich it was bought by the 
Bavarian Government, in the teeth of the spirited bidding 
of three meat-extract firms.  From that moment his 
success was continuous and assured, and the Royal Academy 
was thankful, two years later, to give a conspicuous 
position on its walls to his large canvas "Barbary Apes 
Wrecking a Boudoir."

Eshley presented Adela Pingsford with a new copy of 
"Israel Kalisch," and a couple of finely flowering plants 
of MADAME ADNRE BLUSSET, but nothing in the nature of a 
real reconciliation has taken place between them.


THE STORY-TELLER


IT was a hot afternoon, and the railway carriage was 
correspondingly sultry, and the next stop was at 
Templecombe, nearly an hour ahead.  The occupants of the 
carriage were a small girl, and a smaller girl, and a 
small boy.  An aunt belonging to the children occupied 
one corner seat, and the further corner seat on the 
opposite side was occupied by a bachelor who was a 
stranger to their party, but the small girls and the 
small boy emphatically occupied the compartment.  Both 
the aunt and the children were conversational in a 
limited, persistent way, reminding one of the attentions 
of a housefly that refuses to be discouraged.  Most of 
the aunt's remarks seemed to begin with "Don't," and 
nearly all of the children's remarks began with "Why?"  
The bachelor said nothing out loud.  "Don't, Cyril, 
don't," exclaimed the aunt, as the small boy began 
smacking the cushions of the seat, producing a cloud of 
dust at each blow.

"Come and look out of the window," she added.

The child moved reluctantly to the window.  "Why are 
those sheep being driven out of that field?" he asked.

"I expect they are being driven to another field 
where there is more grass," said the aunt weakly.

"But there is lots of grass in that field," 
protested the boy; "there's nothing else but grass there.  
Aunt, there's lots of grass in that field."

"Perhaps the grass in the other field is better," 
suggested the aunt fatuously.

"Why is it better?" came the swift, inevitable 
question.

"Oh, look at those cows!" exclaimed the aunt.  
Nearly every field along the line had contained cows or 
bullocks, but she spoke as though she were drawing 
attention to a rarity.

"Why is the grass in the other field better?" 
persisted Cyril.

The frown on the bachelor's face was deepening to a 
scowl.  He was a hard, unsympathetic man, the aunt 
decided in her mind.  She was utterly unable to come to 
any satisfactory decision about the grass in the other 
field.

The smaller girl created a diversion by beginning to 
recite "On the Road to Mandalay."  She only knew the 
first line, but she put her limited knowledge to the 
fullest possible use.  She repeated the line over and 
over again in a dreamy but resolute and very audible 
voice; it seemed to the bachelor as though some one had 
had a bet with her that she could not repeat the line 
aloud two thousand times without stopping.  Whoever it 
was who had made the wager was likely to lose his bet.

"Come over here and listen to a story," said the 
aunt, when the bachelor had looked twice at her and once 
at the communication cord.

The children moved listlessly towards the aunt's end 
of the carriage.  Evidently her reputation as a story-
teller did not rank high in their estimation.

In a low, confidential voice, interrupted at 
frequent intervals by loud, petulant questionings from 
her listeners, she began an unenterprising and deplorably 
uninteresting story about a little girl who was good, and 
made friends with every one on account of her goodness, 
and was finally saved from a mad bull by a number of 
rescuers who admired her moral character.

"Wouldn't they have saved her if she hadn't been 
good?" demanded the bigger of the small girls.  It was 
exactly the question that the bachelor had wanted to ask.

"Well, yes," admitted the aunt lamely, "but I don't 
think they would have run quite so fast to her help if 
they had not liked her so much."

"It's the stupidest story I've ever heard," said the 
bigger of the small girls, with immense conviction.

"I didn't listen after the first bit, it was so 
stupid," said Cyril.

The smaller girl made no actual comment on the 
story, but she had long ago recommenced a murmured 
repetition of her favourite line.

"You don't seem to be a success as a story-teller," 
said the bachelor suddenly from his corner.

The aunt bristled in instant defence at this 
unexpected attack.

"It's a very difficult thing to tell stories that 
children can both understand and appreciate," she said 
stiffly.

"I don't agree with you," said the bachelor.

"Perhaps you would like to tell them a story," was 
the aunt's retort.

"Tell us a story," demanded the bigger of the small 
girls.

"Once upon a time," began the bachelor, "there was a 
little girl called Bertha, who was extra-ordinarily 
good."

The children's momentarily-aroused interest began at 
once to flicker; all stories seemed dreadfully alike, no 
matter who told them.

"She did all that she was told, she was always 
truthful, she kept her clothes clean, ate milk puddings 
as though they were jam tarts, learned her lessons 
perfectly, and was polite in her manners."

"Was she pretty?" asked the bigger of the small 
girls.

"Not as pretty as any of you," said the bachelor, 
"but she was horribly good."

There was a wave of reaction in favour of the story; 
the word horrible in connection with goodness was a 
novelty that commended itself.  It seemed to introduce a 
ring of truth that was absent from the aunt's tales of 
infant life.

"She was so good," continued the bachelor, "that she 
won several medals for goodness, which she always wore, 
pinned on to her dress.  There was a medal for obedience, 
another medal for punctuality, and a third for good 
behaviour.  They were large metal medals and they clicked 
against one another as she walked.  No other child in the 
town where she lived had as many as three medals, so 
everybody knew that she must be an extra good child."

"Horribly good," quoted Cyril.

"Everybody talked about her goodness, and the Prince 
of the country got to hear about it, and he said that as 
she was so very good she might be allowed once a week to 
walk in his park, which was just outside the town.  It 
was a beautiful park, and no children were ever allowed 
in it, so it was a great honour for Bertha to be allowed 
to go there."

"Were there any sheep in the park?" demanded Cyril.

"No;" said the bachelor, "there were no sheep."

"Why weren't there any sheep?" came the inevitable 
question arising out of that answer.

The aunt permitted herself a smile, which might 
almost have been described as a grin.

"There were no sheep in the park," said the 
bachelor, "because the Prince's mother had once had a 
dream that her son would either be killed by a sheep or 
else by a clock falling on him.  For that reason the 
Prince never kept a sheep in his park or a clock in his 
palace."

The aunt suppressed a gasp of admiration.

"Was the Prince killed by a sheep or by a clock?" 
asked Cyril.

"He is still alive, so we can't tell whether the 
dream will come true," said the bachelor unconcernedly; 
"anyway, there were no sheep in the park, but there were 
lots of little pigs running all over the place."

"What colour were they?"

"Black with white faces, white with black spots, 
black all over, grey with white patches, and some were 
white all over."

The storyteller paused to let a full idea of the 
park's treasures sink into the children's imaginations; 
then he resumed:

"Bertha was rather sorry to find that there were no 
flowers in the park.  She had promised her aunts, with 
tears in her eyes, that she would not pick any of the 
kind Prince's flowers, and she had meant to keep her 
promise, so of course it made her feel silly to find that 
there were no flowers to pick."

"Why weren't there any flowers?"

"Because the pigs had eaten them all," said the 
bachelor promptly.  "The gardeners had told the Prince 
that you couldn't have pigs and flowers, so he decided to 
have pigs and no flowers."

There was a murmur of approval at the excellence of 
the Prince's decision; so many people would have decided 
the other way.

"There were lots of other delightful things in the 
park.  There were ponds with gold and blue and green fish 
in them, and trees with beautiful parrots that said 
clever things at a moment's notice, and humming birds 
that hummed all the popular tunes of the day.  Bertha 
walked up and down and enjoyed herself immensely, and 
thought to herself: 'If I were not so extraordinarily 
good I should not have been allowed to come into this 
beautiful park and enjoy all that there is to be seen in 
it,' and her three medals clinked against one another as 
she walked and helped to remind her how very good she 
really was.  Just then an enormous wolf came prowling 
into the park to see if it could catch a fat little pig 
for its supper."

"What colour was it?" asked the children, amid an 
immediate quickening of interest.

"Mud-colour all over, with a black tongue and pale 
grey eyes that gleamed with unspeakable ferocity.  The 
first thing that it saw in the park was Bertha; her 
pinafore was so spotlessly white and clean that it could 
be seen from a great distance.  Bertha saw the wolf and 
saw that it was stealing towards her, and she began to 
wish that she had never been allowed to come into the 
park.  She ran as hard as she could, and the wolf came 
after her with huge leaps and bounds.  She managed to 
reach a shrubbery of myrtle bushes and she hid herself in 
one of the thickest of the bushes.  The wolf came 
sniffing among the branches, its black tongue lolling out 
of its mouth and its pale grey eyes glaring with rage.  
Bertha was terribly frightened, and thought to herself: 
'If I had not been so extraordinarily good I should have 
been safe in the town at this moment.'  However, the 
scent of the myrtle was so strong that the wolf could not 
sniff out where Bertha was hiding, and the bushes were so 
thick that he might have hunted about in them for a long 
time without catching sight of her, so he thought he 
might as well go off and catch a little pig instead.  
Bertha was trembling very much at having the wolf 
prowling and sniffing so near her, and as she trembled 
the medal for obedience clinked against the medals for 
good conduct and punctuality.  The wolf was just moving 
away when he heard the sound of the medals clinking and 
stopped to listen; they clinked again in a bush quite 
near him.  He dashed into the bush, his pale grey eyes 
gleaming with ferocity and triumph, and dragged Bertha 
out and devoured her to the last morsel.  All that was 
left of her were her shoes, bits of clothing, and the 
three medals for goodness."

"Were any of the little pigs killed?"

"No, they all escaped."

"The story began badly," said the smaller of the 
small girls, "but it had a beautiful ending."

"It is the most beautiful story that I ever heard," 
said the bigger of the small girls, with immense 
decision.

"It is the ONLY beautiful story I have ever heard," 
said Cyril.

A dissentient opinion came from the aunt.

"A most improper story to tell to young children!  
You have undermined the effect of years of careful 
teaching."

"At any rate," said the bachelor, collecting his 
belongings preparatory to leaving the carriage, "I kept 
them quiet for ten minutes, which was more than you were 
able to do."

"Unhappy woman!" he observed to himself as he walked 
down the platform of Templecombe station; "for the next 
six months or so those children will assail her in public 
with demands for an improper story!"


A DEFENSIVE DIAMOND


TREDDLEFORD sat in an easeful arm-chair in front of 
a slumberous fire, with a volume of verse in his hand and 
the comfortable consciousness that outside the club 
windows the rain was dripping and pattering with 
persistent purpose.  A chill, wet October afternoon was 
merging into a bleak, wet October evening, and the club 
smoking-room seemed warmer and cosier by contrast.  It 
was an afternoon on which to be wafted away from one's 
climatic surroundings, and "The Golden journey to 
Samarkand" promised to bear Treddleford well and bravely 
into other lands and under other skies.  He had already 
migrated from London the rain-swept to Bagdad the 
Beautiful, and stood by the Sun Gate "in the olden time" 
when an icy breath of imminent annoyance seemed to creep 
between the book and himself.  Amblecope, the man with 
the restless, prominent eyes and the mouth ready 
mobilised for conversational openings, had planted 
himself in a neighbouring arm-chair.  For a twelvemonth 
and some odd weeks Treddleford had skilfully avoided 
making the acquaintance of his voluble fellow-clubman; he 
had marvellously escaped from the infliction of his 
relentless record of tedious personal achievements, or 
alleged achievements, on golf links, turf, and gaming 
table, by flood and field and covert-side.  Now his 
season of immunity was coming to an end.  There was no 
escape; in another moment he would be numbered among 
those who knew Amblecope to speak to - or rather, to 
suffer being spoken to.

The intruder was armed with a copy of COUNTRY LIFE, 
not for purposes of reading, but as an aid to 
conversational ice-breaking.

"Rather a good portrait of Throstlewing," he 
remarked explosively, turning his large challenging eyes 
on Treddleford; "somehow it reminds me very much of 
Yellowstep, who was supposed to be such a good thing for 
the Grand Prix in 1903.  Curious race that was; I suppose 
I've seen every race for the Grand Prix for the last - "

"Be kind enough never to mention the Grand Prix in 
my hearing," said Treddleford desperately; "it awakens 
acutely distressing memories.  I can't explain why 
without going into a long and complicated story."

"Oh,  certainly, certainly," said Amblecope hastily; 
long and complicated stories that were not told by 
himself were abominable in his eyes.  He turned the pages 
of COUNTRY LIFE and became spuriously interested in the 
picture of a Mongolian pheasant.

"Not a bad representation of the Mongolian variety," 
he exclaimed, holding it up for his neighbour's 
inspection.  "They do very well in some covers.  Take 
some stopping too, once they're fairly on the wing.  I 
suppose the biggest bag I ever made in two successive 
days - "

"My aunt, who owns the greater part of 
Lincolnshire," broke in Treddleford, with dramatic 
abruptness, "possesses perhaps the most remarkable record 
in the way of a pheasant bag that has ever been achieved.  
She is seventy-five and can't hit a thing, but she always 
goes out with the guns.  When I say she can't hit a 
thing, I don't mean to say that she doesn't occasionally 
endanger the lives of her fellow-guns, because that 
wouldn't be true.  In fact, the chief Government Whip 
won't allow Ministerial M.P.'s to go out with her; 'We 
don't want to incur by-elections needlessly,' he quite 
reasonably observed.  Well, the other day she winged a 
pheasant, and brought it to earth with a feather or two 
knocked out of it; it was a runner, and my aunt saw 
herself in danger of being done out of about the only 
bird she'd hit during the present reign.  Of course she 
wasn't going to stand that; she followed it through 
bracken and brushwood, and when it took to the open 
country and started across a ploughed field she jumped on 
to the shooting pony and went after it.  The chase was a 
long one, and when my aunt at last ran the bird to a 
standstill she was nearer home than she was to the 
shooting party; she had left that some five miles behind 
her."

"Rather a long run for a wounded pheasant," snapped 
Amblecope.

"The story rests on my aunt's authority," said 
Treddleford coldly, "and she is local vice-president of 
the Young Women's Christian Association.  She trotted 
three miles or so to her home, and it was not till the 
middle of the afternoon that it was discovered that the 
lunch for the entire shooting party was in a pannier 
attached to the pony's saddle.  Anyway, she got her 
bird."

"Some birds, of course, take a lot of killing," said 
Amblecope; "so do some fish.  I remember once I was 
fishing in the Exe, lovely trout stream, lots of fish, 
though they don't run to any great size - "

"One of them did," announced Treddleford, with 
emphasis.  "My uncle, the Bishop of Southmolton, came 
across a giant trout in a pool just off the main stream 
of the Exe near Ugworthy; he tried it with every kind of 
fly and worm every day for three weeks without an atom of 
success, and then Fate intervened on his behalf.  There 
was a low stone bridge just over this pool, and on the 
last day of his fishing holiday a motor van ran violently 
into the parapet and turned completely over; no one was 
hurt, but part of the parapet was knocked away, and the 
entire load that the van was carrying was pitched over 
and fell a little way into the pool.  In a couple of 
minutes the giant trout was flapping and twisting on bare 
mud at the bottom of a waterless pool, and my uncle was 
able to walk down to him and fold him to his breast.  The 
van-load consisted of blotting-paper, and every drop of 
water in that pool had been sucked up into the mass of 
spilt cargo."

There was silence for nearly half a minute in the 
smoking-room, and Treddleford began to let his mind steal 
back towards the golden road that led to Samarkand.  
Amblecope, however, rallied, and remarked in a rather 
tired and dispirited voice:

"Talking of motor accidents, the narrowest squeak I 
ever had was the other day, motoring with old Tommy Yarby 
in North Wales.  Awfully good sort, old Yarby, thorough 
good sportsman, and the best - "

"It was in North Wales," said Treddleford, "that my 
sister met with her sensational carriage accident last 
year.  She was on her way to a garden-party at Lady 
Nineveh's, about the only garden-party that ever comes to 
pass in those parts in the course of the year, and 
therefore a thing that she would have been very sorry to 
miss.  She was driving a young horse that she'd only 
bought a week or two previously, warranted to be 
perfectly steady with motor traffic, bicycles, and other 
common objects of the roadside.  The animal lived up to 
its reputation, and passed the most explosive of motor-
bikes with an indifference that almost amounted to 
apathy.  However, I suppose we all draw the line 
somewhere, and this particular cob drew it at travelling 
wild beast shows.  Of course my sister didn't know that, 
but she knew it very distinctly when she turned a sharp 
corner and found herself in a mixed company of camels, 
piebald horses, and canary-coloured vans.  The dogcart 
was overturned in a ditch and kicked to splinters, and 
the cob went home across country.  Neither my sister nor 
the groom was hurt, but the problem of how to get to the 
Nineveh garden-party, some three miles distant, seemed 
rather difficult to solve; once there, of course, my 
sister would easily find some one to drive her home.  'I 
suppose you wouldn't care for the loan of a couple of my 
camels?' the showman suggested, in humorous sympathy.  ' 
I would,' said my sister, who had ridden camel-back in 
Egypt, and she overruled the objections of the groom, who 
hadn't.  She picked out two of the most presentable-
looking of the beasts and had them dusted and made as 
tidy as was possible at short notice, and set out for the 
Nineveh mansion.  You may imagine the sensation that her 
small but imposing caravan created when she arrived at 
the hall door.  The entire garden-party flocked up to 
gape.  My sister was rather glad to slip down from her 
camel, and the groom was thankful to scramble down from 
his.  Then young Billy Doulton, of the Dragoon Guards, 
who has been a lot at Aden and thinks he knows camel-
language backwards, thought he would show off by making 
the beasts kneel down in orthodox fashion.  Unfortunately 
camel words-of-command are not the same all the world 
over; these were magnificent Turkestan camels, accustomed 
to stride up the stony terraces of mountain passes, and 
when Doulton shouted at them they went side by side up 
the front steps, into the entrance hall, and up the grand 
staircase.  The German governess met them just at the 
turn of the corridor.  The Ninevehs nursed her with 
devoted attention for weeks, and when I last heard from 
them she was well enough to go about her duties again, 
but the doctor says she will always suffer from Hagenbeck 
heart."

Amblecope got up from his chair and moved to another 
part of the room.  Treddleford reopened his book and 
betook himself once more across


The dragon-green, the luminous, the dark, the 
serpent-haunted sea.


For a blessed half-hour he disported himself in 
imagination by the "gay Aleppo-Gate," and listened to the 
bird-voiced singing-man.  Then the world of to-day called 
him back; a page summoned him to speak with a friend on 
the telephone.

As Treddleford was about to pass out of the room he 
encountered Amblecope, also passing out, on his way to 
the billiard-room, where, perchance, some luckless wight 
might be secured and held fast to listen to the number of 
his attendances at the Grand Prix, with subsequent 
remarks on Newmarket and the Cambridgeshire.  Amblecope 
made as if to pass out first, but a new-born pride was 
surging in Treddleford's breast and he waved him back.

"I believe I take precedence," he said coldly; "you 
are merely the club Bore; I am the club Liar."


THE ELK


TERESA, Mrs. Thropplestance, was the richest and 
most intractable old woman in the county of Woldshire.  
In her dealings with the world in general her manner 
suggested a blend between a Mistress of the Robes and a 
Master of Foxhounds, with the vocabulary of both.  In her 
domestic circle she comported herself in the arbitrary 
style that one attributes, probably without the least 
justification, to an American political Boss in the bosom 
of his caucus.  The late Theodore Thropplestance had left 
her, some thirty-five years ago, in absolute possession 
of a considerable fortune, a large landed property, and a 
gallery full of valuable pictures.  In those intervening 
years she had outlived her son and quarrelled with her 
elder grandson, who had married without her consent or 
approval.  Bertie Thropplestance, her younger grandson, 
was the heir-designate to her property, and as such he 
was a centre of interest and concern to some half-hundred 
ambitious mothers with daughters of marriageable age.  
Bertie was an amiable, easy-going young man, who was 
quite ready to marry anyone who was favourably 
recommended to his notice, but he was not going to waste 
his time in falling in love with anyone who would come 
under his grandmother's veto.  The favourable 
recommendation would have to come from Mrs. 
Thropplestance.

Teresa's house-parties were always rounded off with 
a plentiful garnishing of presentable young women and 
alert, attendant mothers, but the old lady was 
emphatically discouraging whenever any one of her girl 
guests became at all likely to outbid the others as a 
possible granddaughter-in-law.  It was the inheritance of 
her fortune and estate that was in question, and she was 
evidently disposed to exercise and enjoy her powers of 
selection and rejection to the utmost.  Bertie's 
preferences did not greatly matter; he was of the sort 
who can be stolidly happy with any kind of wife; he had 
cheerfully put up with his grandmother all his life, so 
was not likely to fret and fume over anything that might 
befall him in the way of a helpmate.

The party that gathered under Teresa's roof in 
Christmas week of the year nineteen-hundred-and-something 
was of smaller proportions than usual, and Mrs. Yonelet, 
who formed one of the party, was inclined to deduce 
hopeful augury from this circumstance.  Dora Yonelet and 
Bertie were so obviously made for one another, she 
confided to the vicar's wife, and if the old lady were 
accustomed to seeing them about a lot together she might 
adopt the view that they would make a suitable married 
couple.

"People soon get used to an idea if it is dangled 
constantly before their eyes," said Mrs. Yonelet 
hopefully, "and the more often Teresa sees those young 
people together, happy in each other's company, the more 
she will get to take a kindly interest in Dora as a 
possible and desirable wife for Bertie."

"My dear," said the vicar's wife resignedly, "my own 
Sybil was thrown together with Bertie under the most 
romantic circumstances - I'll tell you about it some day 
- but it made no impression whatever on Teresa; she put 
her foot down in the most uncompromising fashion, and 
Sybil married an Indian civilian."

"Quite right of her," said Mrs. Yonelet with vague 
approval; "it's what any girl of spirit would have done.  
Still, that was a year or two ago, I believe; Bertie is 
older now, and so is Teresa.  Naturally she must be 
anxious to see him settled."

The vicar's wife reflected that Teresa seemed to be 
the one person who showed no immediate anxiety to supply 
Bertie with a wife, but she kept the thought to herself.

Mrs. Yonelet was a woman of resourceful energy and 
generalship; she involved the other members of the house-
party, the deadweight, so to speak, in all manner of 
exercises and occupations that segregated them from 
Bertie and Dora, who were left to their own devisings - 
that is to say, to Dora's devisings and Bertie's 
accommodating acquiescence.  Dora helped in the Christmas 
decorations of the parish church, and Bertie helped her 
to help.  Together they fed the swans, till the birds 
went on a dyspepsia-strike, together they played 
billiards, together they photographed the village 
almshouses, and, at a respectful distance, the tame elk 
that browsed in solitary aloofness in the park.  It was 
"tame" in the sense that it had long ago discarded the 
least vestige of fear of the human race; nothing in its 
record encouraged its human neighbours to feel a 
reciprocal confidence.

Whatever sport or exercise or occupation Bertie and 
Dora indulged in together was unfailingly chronicled and 
advertised by Mrs. Yonelet for the due enlightenment of 
Bertie's grandmother.

"Those two inseparables have just come in from a 
bicycle ride," she would announce; "quite a picture they 
make, so fresh and glowing after their spin."

"A picture needing words," would be Teresa's private 
comment, and as far as Bertie was concerned she was 
determined that the words should remain unspoken.

On the afternoon after Christmas Day Mrs. Yonelet 
dashed into the drawing-room, where her hostess was 
sitting amid a circle of guests and teacups and muffin-
dishes.  Fate had placed what seemed like a trump-card in 
the hands of the patiently-manoeuvring mother.  With eyes 
blazing with excitement and a voice heavily escorted with 
exclamation marks she made a dramatic announcement.

"Bertie has saved Dora from the elk!"

In swift, excited sentences, broken with maternal 
emotion, she gave supplementary information as to how the 
treacherous animal had ambushed Dora as she was hunting 
for a strayed golf ball, and how Bertie had dashed to her 
rescue with a stable fork and driven the beast off in the 
nick of time.

"It was touch and go!  She threw her niblick at it, 
but that didn't stop it.  In another moment she would 
have been crushed beneath its hoofs," panted Mrs. 
Yonelet.

"The animal is not safe," said Teresa, handing her 
agitated guest a cup of tea.  "I forget if you take 
sugar.  I suppose the solitary life it leads has soured 
its temper.  There are muffins in the grate.  It's not my 
fault; I've tried to get it a mate for ever so long.  You 
don't know of anyone with a lady elk for sale or 
exchange, do you?" she asked the company generally.

But Mrs. Yonelet was in no humour to listen to talk 
of elk marriages.  The mating of two human beings was the 
subject uppermost in her mind, and the opportunity for 
advancing her pet project was too valuable to be 
neglected.

"Teresa," she exclaimed impressively, "after those 
two young people have been thrown together so 
dramatically, nothing can be quite the same again between 
them.  Bertie has done more than save Dora's life; he has 
earned her affection.  One cannot help feeling that Fate 
has consecrated them for one another."

"Exactly what the vicar's wife said when Bertie 
saved Sybil from the elk a year or two ago," observed 
Teresa placidly; "I pointed out to her that he had 
rescued Mirabel Hicks from the same predicement a few 
months previously, and that priority really belonged to 
the gardener's boy, who had been rescued in the January 
of that year.  There is a good deal of sameness in 
country life, you know."

"It seems to be a very dangerous animal," said one 
of the guests.

"That's what the mother of the gardener's boy said," 
remarked Teresa; "she wanted me to have it destroyed, but 
I pointed out to her that she had eleven children and I 
had only one elk.  I also gave her a black silk skirt; 
she said that though there hadn't been a funeral in her 
family she felt as if there had been.  Anyhow, we parted 
friends.  I can't offer you a silk skirt, Emily, but you 
may have another cup of tea.  As I have already remarked, 
there are muffins in the grate."

Teresa dosed the discussion, having deftly conveyed 
the impression that she considered the mother of the 
gardener's boy had shown a far more reasonable spirit 
than the parents of other elk-assaulted victims.

"Teresa is devoid of feeling," said Mrs. Yonelet 
afterwards to the vicar's wife; "to sit there, talking of 
muffins, with an appalling tragedy only narrowly averted 
- "

"Of course you know whom she really intends Bertie 
to marry?" asked the vicar's wife; "I've noticed it for 
some time.  The Bickelbys' German governess."

"A German governess!  What an idea!" gasped Mrs. 
Yonelet.

"She's of quite good family, I believe," said the 
vicar's wife, "and not at all the mouse-in-the-back-
ground sort of person that governesses are usually 
supposed to be.  In fact, next to Teresa, she's about the 
most assertive and combative personality in the 
neighbourhood.  She's pointed out to my husband all sorts 
of errors in his sermons, and she gave Sir Laurence a 
public lecture on how he ought to handle the hounds.  You 
know how sensitive Sir Laurence is about any criticism of 
his Mastership, and to have a governess laying down the 
law to him nearly drove him into a fit.  She's behaved 
like that to every one, except, of course, Teresa, and 
every one has been defensively rude to her in return.  
The Bickelbys are simply too afraid of her to get rid of 
her.  Now isn't that exactly the sort of woman whom 
Teresa would take a delight in installing as her 
successor?  Imagine the discomfort and awkwardness in the 
county if we suddenly found that she was to be the future 
hostess at the Hall.  Teresa's only regret will be that 
she won't be alive to see it."

"But," objected Mrs. Yonelet, "surely Bertie hasn't 
shown the least sign of being attracted in that quarter?"

"Oh, she's quite nice-looking in a way, and dresses 
well, and plays a good game of tennis.  She often comes 
across the park with messages from the Bickelby mansion, 
and one of these days Bertie will rescue her from the 
elk, which has become almost a habit with him, and Teresa 
will say that Fate has consecrated them to one another.  
Bertie might not be disposed to pay much attention to the 
consecrations of Fate, but he would not dream of opposing 
his grandmother."

The vicar's wife spoke with the quiet authority of 
one who has intuitive knowledge, and in her heart of 
hearts Mrs. Yonelet believed her.

Six months later the elk had to be destroyed.  In a 
fit of exceptional moroseness it had killed the 
Bickelbys' German governess.  It was an irony of its fate 
that it should achieve popularity in the last moments of 
its career; at any rate, it established, the record of 
being the only living thing that had permanently thwarted 
Teresa Thropplestance's plans.

Dora Yonelet broke off her engagement with an Indian 
civilian, and married Bertie three months after his 
grandmother's death - Teresa did not long survive the 
German governess fiasco.  At Christmas time every year 
young Mrs. Thropplestance hangs an extra large festoon of 
evergreens on the elk horns that decorate the hall.

"It was a fearsome beast," she observes to Bertie, 
"but I always feel that it was instrumental in bringing 
us together."

Which, of course, was true.


"DOWN PENS"


"HAVE you written to thank the Froplinsons for what 
they sent us?" asked Egbert.

"No," said Janetta, with a note of tired defiance in 
her voice; "I've written eleven letters to-day expressing 
surprise and gratitude for sundry unmerited gifts, but I 
haven't written to the Froplinsons."

"Some one will have to write to them," said Egbert.

"I don't dispute the necessity, but I don't think 
the some one should be me," said Janetta.  "I wouldn't 
mind writing a letter of angry recrimination or heartless 
satire to some suitable recipient; in fact, I should 
rather enjoy it, but I've come to the end of my capacity 
for expressing servile amiability.  Eleven letters to-day 
and nine yesterday, all couched in the same strain of 
ecstatic thankfulness: really, you can't expect me to sit 
down to another.  There is such a thing as writing 
oneself out."

"I've written nearly as many," said Egbert, "and 
I've had my usual business correspondence to get through, 
too.  Besides, I don't know what it was that the 
Froplinsons sent us."

"A William the Conqueror calendar," said Janetta, 
"with a quotation of one of his great thoughts for every 
day in the year."

"Impossible," said Egbert; "he didn't have three 
hundred and sixty-five thoughts in the whole of his life, 
or, if he did, he kept them to himself.  He was a man of 
action, not of introspection."

"Well, it was William Wordsworth, then," said 
Janetta; "I know William came into it somewhere."

"That sounds more probable," said Egbert; "well, 
let's collaborate on this letter of thanks and get it 
done.  I'll dictate, and you can scribble it down.  'Dear 
Mrs. Froplinson - thank you and your husband so much for 
the very pretty calendar you sent us.  It was very good 
of you to think of us.' "

"You can't possibly say that," said Janetta, laying 
down her pen.

"It's what I always do say, and what every one says 
to me," protested Egbert.

"We sent them something on the twenty-second," said 
Janetta, "so they simply HAD to think of us.  There was 
no getting away from it."

"What did we send them?" asked Egbert gloomily.

"Bridge-markers," said Janetta, "in a cardboard 
case, with some inanity about 'digging for fortune with a 
royal spade' emblazoned on the cover.  The moment I saw 
it in the shop I said to myself 'Froplinsons' and to the 
attendant 'How much?'  When he said 'Ninepence,' I gave 
him their address, jabbed our card in, paid tenpence or 
elevenpence to cover the postage, and thanked heaven.  
With less sincerity and infinitely more trouble they 
eventually thanked me."

"The Froplinsons don't play bridge," said Egbert.

"One is not supposed to notice social deformities of 
that sort," said Janetta; "it wouldn't be polite.  
Besides, what trouble did they take to find out whether 
we read Wordsworth with gladness?   For all they knew or 
cared we might be frantically embedded in the belief that 
all poetry begins and ends with John Masefield, and it 
might infuriate or depress us to have a daily sample of 
Wordsworthian products flung at us."

"Well, let's get on with the letter of thanks," said 
Egbert.

"Proceed," said Janetta.

" 'How clever of you to guess that Wordsworth is our 
favourite poet,' " dictated Egbert.

Again Janetta laid down her pen.

"Do you realise what that means?" she asked; "a 
Wordsworth booklet next Christmas, and another calendar 
the Christmas after, with the same problem of having to 
write suitable letters of thankfulness.  No, the best 
thing to do is to drop all further allusion to the 
calendar and switch off on to some other topic."

"But what other topic?"

"Oh, something like this: 'What do you think of the 
New Year Honours List?  A friend of ours made such a 
clever remark when he read it.'  Then you can stick in 
any remark that comes into your head; it needn't be 
clever.  The Froplinsons won't know whether it is or 
isn't."

"We don't even know on which side they are in 
politics," objected Egbert; "and anyhow you can't 
suddenly dismiss the subject of the calendar.  Surely 
there must be some intelligent remark that can be made 
about it."

"Well, we can't think of one," said Janetta wearily; 
"the fact is, we've both written ourselves out.  Heavens!  
I've just remembered Mrs. Stephen Ludberry.  I haven't 
thanked her for what she sent."

"What did she send?"

"I forget; I think it was a calendar."

There was a long silence, the forlorn silence of 
those who are bereft of hope and have almost ceased to 
care.

Presently Egbert started from his seat with an air 
of resolution.  The light of battle was in his eyes.

"Let me come to the writing-table," he exclaimed.

"Gladly," said Janetta.  "Are you going to write to 
Mrs. Ludberry or the Froplinsons?"

"To neither," said Egbert, drawing a stack of 
notepaper towards him; "I'm going to write to the editor 
of every enlightened and influential newspaper in the 
Kingdom, I'm going to suggest that there should be a sort 
of epistolary Truce of God during the festivities of 
Christmas and New Year.  From the twenty-fourth of 
December to the third or fourth of January it shall be 
considered an offence against good sense and good feeling 
to write or expect any letter or communication that does 
not deal with the necessary events of the moment.  
Answers to invitations, arrangements about trains, 
renewal of club subscriptions, and, of course, all the 
ordinary everyday affairs of business, sickness, engaging 
new cooks, and so forth, these will be dealt with in the 
usual manner as something inevitable, a legitimate part 
of our daily life.  But all the devastating accretions of 
correspondence, incident to the festive season, these 
should be swept away to give the season a chance of being 
really festive, a time of untroubled, unpunctuated peace 
and good will."

"But you would have to make some acknowledgment of 
presents received," objected Janetta; "otherwise people 
would never know whether they had arrived safely."

"Of course, I have thought of that," said Egbert; 
"every present that was sent off would be accompanied by 
a ticket bearing the date of dispatch and the signature 
of the sender, and some conventional hieroglyphic to show 
that it was intended to be a Christmas or New Year gift; 
there would be a counterfoil with space for the 
recipient's name and the date of arrival, and all you 
would have to do would be to sign and date the 
counterfoil, add a conventional hieroglyphic indicating 
heartfelt thanks and gratified surprise, put the thing 
into an envelope and post it."

"It sounds delightfully simple," said Janetta 
wistfully, "but people would consider it too cut-and-
dried, too perfunctory."

"It is not a bit more perfunctory than the present 
system," said Egbert; "I have only the same conventional 
language of gratitude at my disposal with which to thank 
dear old Colonel Chuttle for his perfectly delicious 
Stilton, which we shall devour to the last morsel, and 
the Froplinsons for their calendar, which we shall never 
look at.  Colonel Chuttle knows that we are grateful for 
the Stilton, without having to be told so, and the 
Froplinsons know that we are bored with their calendar, 
whatever we may say to the contrary, just as we know that 
they are bored with the bridge-markers in spite of their 
written assurance that they thanked us for our charming 
little gift.  What is more, the Colonel knows that even 
if we had taken a sudden aversion to Stilton or been 
forbidden it by the doctor, we should still have written 
a letter of hearty thanks around it.  So you see the 
present system of acknowledgment is just as perfunctory 
and conventional as the counterfoil business would be, 
only ten times more tiresome and brain-racking."

"Your plan would certainly bring the ideal of a 
Happy Christmas a step nearer realisation," said Janetta.

"There are exceptions, of course," said Egbert, 
"people who really try to infuse a breath of reality into 
their letters of acknowledgment.  Aunt Susan, for 
instance, who writes: 'Thank you very much for the ham; 
not such a good flavour as the one you sent last year, 
which itself was not a particularly good one.  Hams are 
not what they used to be.'  It would be a pity to be 
deprived of her Christmas comments, but that loss would 
be swallowed up in the general gain."

"Meanwhile," said Janetta, "what am I to say to the 
Froplinsons?"


THE NAME-DAY


ADVENTURES, according to the proverb, are to the 
adventurous.  Quite as often they are to the non-
adventurous, to the retiring, to the constitutionally 
timid.  John James Abbleway had been endowed by Nature 
with the sort of disposition that instinctively avoids 
Carlist intrigues, slum crusades, the tracking of wounded 
wild beasts, and the moving of hostile amendments at 
political meetings.  If a mad dog or a Mad Mullah had 
come his way he would have surrendered the way without 
hesitation.  At school he had unwillingly acquired a 
thorough knowledge of the German tongue out of deference 
to the plainly-expressed wishes of a foreign-languages 
master, who, though he taught modern subjects, employed 
old-fashioned methods in driving his lessons home.  It 
was this enforced familiarity with an important 
commercial language which thrust Abbleway in later years 
into strange lands where adventures were less easy to 
guard against than in the ordered atmosphere of an 
English country town.  The firm that he worked for saw 
fit to send him one day on a prosaic business errand to 
the far city of Vienna, and, having sent him there, 
continued to keep him there, still engaged in humdrum 
affairs of commerce, but with the possibilities of 
romance and adventure, or even misadventure, jostling at 
his elbow.  After two and a half years of exile, however, 
John James Abbleway had embarked on only one hazardous 
undertaking, and that was of a nature which would 
assuredly have overtaken him sooner or later if he had 
been leading a sheltered, stay-at-home existence at 
Dorking or Huntingdon.  He fell placidly in love with a 
placidly lovable English girl, the sister of one of his 
commercial colleagues, who was improving her mind by a 
short trip to foreign parts, and in due course he was 
formally accepted as the young man she was engaged to.  
The further step by which she was to become Mrs. John 
Abbleway was to take place a twelvemonth hence in a town 
in the English midlands, by which time the firm that 
employed John James would have no further need for his 
presence in the Austrian capital.

It was early in April, two months after the 
installation of Abbleway as the young man Miss Penning 
was engaged to, when he received a letter from her, 
written from Venice.  She was still peregrinating under 
the wing of her brother, and as the latter's business 
arrangements would take him across to Fiume for a day or 
two, she had conceived the idea that it would be rather 
jolly if John could obtain leave of absence and run down 
to the Adriatic coast to meet them.  She had looked up 
the route on the map, and the journey did not appear 
likely to be expensive.  Between the lines of her 
communication there lay a hint that if he really cared 
for her -

Abbleway obtained leave of absence and added a 
journey to Fiume to his life's adventures.  He left 
Vienna on a cold, cheerless day.  The flower shops were 
full of spring blooms, and the weekly organs of 
illustrated humour were full of spring topics, but the 
skies were heavy with clouds that looked like cotton-wool 
that has been kept over long in a shop window.

"Snow comes," said the train official to the station 
officials; and they agreed that snow was about to come.  
And it came, rapidly, plenteously.  The train had not 
been more than an hour on its journey when the cotton-
wool clouds commenced to dissolve in a blinding downpour 
of snowflakes.  The forest trees on either side of the 
line were speedily coated with a heavy white mantle, the 
telegraph wires became thick glistening ropes, the line 
itself was buried more and more completely under a 
carpeting of snow, through which the not very powerful 
engine ploughed its way with increasing difficulty.  The 
Vienna-Fiume line is scarcely the best equipped of the 
Austrian State railways, and Abbleway began to have 
serious fears for a breakdown.  The train had slowed down 
to a painful and precarious crawl and presently came to a 
halt at a spot where the drifting snow had accumulated in 
a formidable barrier.  The engine made a special effort 
and broke through the obstruction, but in the course of 
another twenty minutes it was again held up.  The process 
of breaking through was renewed, and the train doggedly 
resumed its way, encountering and surmounting fresh 
hindrances at frequent intervals.  After a standstill of 
unusually long duration in a particularly deep drift the 
compartment in which Abbleway was sitting gave a huge 
jerk and a lurch, and then seemed to remain stationary; 
it undoubtedly was not moving, and yet he could hear the 
puffing of the engine and the slow rumbling and jolting 
of wheels.  The puffing and rumbling grew fainter, as 
though it were dying away through the agency of 
intervening distance.  Abbleway suddenly gave vent to an 
exclamation of scandalised alarm, opened the window, and 
peered out into the snowstorm.  The flakes perched on his 
eyelashes and blurred his vision, but he saw enough to 
help him to realise what had happened.  The engine had 
made a mighty plunge through the drift and had gone 
merrily forward, lightened of the load of its rear 
carriage, whose coupling had snapped under the strain.  
Abbleway was alone, or almost alone, with a derelict 
railway waggon, in the heart of some Styrian or Croatian 
forest.  In the third-class compartment next to his own 
he remembered to have seen a peasant woman, who had 
entered the train at a small wayside station.  "With the 
exception of that woman," he exclaimed dramatically to 
himself, "the nearest living beings are probably a pack 
of wolves."

Before making his way to the third-class compartment 
to acquaint his fellow-traveller with the extent of the 
disaster Abbleway hurriedly pondered the question of the 
woman's nationality.  He had acquired a smattering of 
Slavonic tongues during his residence in Vienna, and felt 
competent to grapple with several racial possibilities.

"If she is Croat or Serb or Bosniak I shall be able 
to make her understand," he promised himself.  "If she is 
Magyar, heaven help me!  We shall have to converse 
entirely by signs."

He entered the carriage and made his momentous 
announcement in the best approach to Croat speech that he 
could achieve.

"The train has broken away and left us!"

The woman shook her head with a movement that might 
be intended to convey resignation to the will of heaven, 
but probably meant noncomprehension.  Abbleway repeated 
his information with variations of Slavonic tongues and 
generous displays of pantomime.

"Ah," said the woman at last in German dialect, "the 
train has gone?  We are left.  Ah, so."

She seemed about as much interested as though 
Abbleway had told her the result of the municipal 
elections in Amsterdam.

"They will find out at some station, and when the 
line is clear of snow they will send an engine.  It 
happens that way sometimes."

"We may be here all night!" exclaimed Abbleway.

The woman nodded as though she thought it possible.

"Are there wolves in these parts?" asked Abbleway 
hurriedly.

"Many," said the woman; "just outside this forest my 
aunt was devoured three years ago, as she was coming home 
from market.  The horse and a young pig that was in the 
cart were eaten too.  The horse was a very old one, but 
it was a beautiful young pig, oh, so fat.  I cried when I 
heard that it was taken.  They spare nothing."

"They may attack us here," said Abbleway 
tremulously; "they could easily break in, these carriages 
are like matchwood.  We may both be devoured."

"You, perhaps," said the woman calmly; "not me."

"Why not you?" demanded Abbleway.

"It is the day of Saint Maria Kleopha, my name-day.  
She would not allow me to be eaten by wolves on her day.  
Such a thing could not be thought of.  You, yes, but not 
me."

Abbleway changed the subject.

"It is only afternoon now; if we are to be left here 
till morning we shall be starving."

"I have here some good eatables," said the woman 
tranquilly; "on my festival day it is natural that I 
should have provision with me.  I have five good blood-
sausages; in the town shops they cost twenty-five heller 
each.  Things are dear in the town shops."

"I will give you fifty heller apiece for a couple of 
them," said Abbleway with some enthusiasm.

"In a railway accident things become very dear," 
said the woman; "these blood-sausages are four kronen 
apiece."

"Four kronen!" exclaimed Abbleway; "four kronen for 
a blood-sausage!"

"You cannot get them any cheaper on this train," 
said the woman, with relentless logic, "because there 
aren't any others to get.  In Agram you can buy them 
cheaper, and in Paradise no doubt they will be given to 
us for nothing, but here they cost four kronen each.  I 
have a small piece of Emmenthaler cheese and a honey-cake 
and a piece of bread that I can let you have.  That will 
be another three kronen, eleven kronen in all.  There is 
a piece of ham, but that I cannot let you have on my 
name-day."

Abbleway wondered to himself what price she would 
have put on the ham, and hurried to pay her the eleven 
kronen before her emergency tariff expanded into a famine 
tariff.  As he was taking possession of his modest store 
of eatables he suddenly heard a noise which set his heart 
thumping in a miserable fever of fear.  'There was a 
scraping and shuffling as of some animal or animals 
trying to climb up to the footboard.  In another moment, 
through the snow-encrusted glass of the carriage window, 
he saw a gaunt prick-eared head, with gaping jaw and 
lolling tongue and gleaming teeth; a second later another 
head shot up.

"There are hundreds of them," whispered Abbleway; 
"they have scented us.  They will tear the carriage to 
pieces.  We shall be devoured."

"Not me, on my name-day.  The holy Maria Kleopha 
would not permit it," said the woman with provoking calm.

The heads dropped down from the window and an 
uncanny silence fell on the beleaguered carriage. 
Abbleway neither moved nor spoke.  Perhaps the brutes had 
not clearly seen or winded the human occupants of the 
carriage, and had prowled away on some other errand of 
rapine.

The long torture-laden minutes passed slowly away.

"It grows cold," said the woman suddenly, crossing 
over to the far end of the carriage, where the heads had 
appeared.  "The heating apparatus does not work any 
longer.  See, over there beyond the trees, there is a 
chimney with smoke coming from it.  It is not far, and 
the snow has nearly stopped, I shall find a path through 
the forest to that house with the chimney."

"But the wolves!" exclaimed Abbleway; "they may - "

"Not on my name-day," said the woman obstinately, 
and before he could stop her she had opened the door and 
climbed down into the snow.  A moment later he hid his 
face in his hands; two gaunt lean figures rushed upon her 
from the forest.  No doubt she had courted her fate, but 
Abbleway had no wish to see a human being torn to pieces 
and devoured before his eyes.

When he looked at last a new sensation of 
scandalised astonishment took possession of him.  He had 
been straitly brought up in a small English town, and he 
was not prepared to be the witness of a miracle.  The 
wolves were not doing anything worse to the woman than 
drench her with snow as they gambolled round her.

A short, joyous bark revealed the clue to the 
situation.

"Are those - dogs?" he called weakly.

"My cousin Karl's dogs, yes," she answered; that is 
his inn, over beyond the trees.  I knew it was there, but 
I did not want to take you there; he is always grasping 
with strangers.  However, it grows too cold to remain in 
the train.  Ah, ah, see what comes!"

A whistle sounded, and a relief engine made its 
appearance, snorting its way sulkily through the snow.  
Abbleway did not have the opportunity for finding out 
whether Karl was really avaricious.


THE LUMBER ROOM


THE children were to be driven, as a special treat, 
to the sands at Jagborough.  Nicholas was not to be of 
the party; he was in disgrace.  Only that morning he had 
refused to eat his wholesome bread-and-milk on the 
seemingly frivolous ground that there was a frog in it.  
Older and wiser and better people had told him that there 
could not possibly be a frog in his bread-and-milk and 
that he was not to talk nonsense; he continued, 
nevertheless, to talk what seemed the veriest nonsense, 
and described with much detail the colouration and 
markings of the alleged frog.  The dramatic part of the 
incident was that there really was a frog in Nicholas' 
basin of bread-and-milk; he had put it there himself, so 
he felt entitled to know something about it.  The sin of 
taking a frog from the garden and putting it into a bowl 
of wholesome bread-and-milk was enlarged on at great 
length, but the fact that stood out clearest in the whole 
affair, as it presented itself to the mind of Nicholas, 
was that the older, wiser, and better people had been 
proved to be profoundly in error in matters about which 
they had expressed the utmost assurance.

"You said there couldn't possibly be a frog in my 
bread-and-milk; there WAS a frog in my bread-and-milk," 
he repeated, with the insistence of a skilled tactician 
who does not intend to shift from favourable ground.

So his boy-cousin and girl-cousin and his quite 
uninteresting younger brother were to be taken to 
Jagborough sands that afternoon and he was to stay at 
home.  His cousins' aunt, who insisted, by an unwarranted 
stretch of imagination, in styling herself his aunt also, 
had hastily invented the Jagborough expedition in order 
to impress on Nicholas the delights that he had justly 
forfeited by his disgraceful conduct at the breakfast-
table.  It was her habit, whenever one of the children 
fell from grace, to improvise something of a festival 
nature from which the offender would be rigorously 
debarred; if all the children sinned collectively they 
were suddenly informed of a circus in a neighbouring 
town, a circus of unrivalled merit and uncounted 
elephants, to which, but for their depravity, they would 
have been taken that very day.

A few decent tears were looked for on the part of 
Nicholas when the moment for the departure of the 
expedition arrived.  As a matter of fact, however, all 
the crying was done by his girl-cousin, who scraped her 
knee rather painfully against the step of the carriage as 
she was scrambling in.

"How she did howl," said Nicholas cheerfully, as the 
party drove off without any of the elation of high 
spirits that should have characterised it.

"She'll soon get over that," said the SOI-DISANT 
aunt; "it will be a glorious afternoon for racing about 
over those beautiful sands.  How they will enjoy 
themselves!"

"Bobby won't enjoy himself much, and he won't race 
much either," said Nicholas with a grim chuckle; his 
boots are hurting him.  They're too tight."

"Why didn't he tell me they were hurting?" asked the 
aunt with some asperity.

"He told you twice, but you weren't listening.  You 
often don't listen when we tell you important things."

"You are not to go into the gooseberry garden," said 
the aunt, changing the subject.

"Why not?" demanded Nicholas.

"Because you are in disgrace," said the aunt 
loftily.

Nicholas did not admit the flawlessness of the 
reasoning; he felt perfectly capable of being in disgrace 
and in a gooseberry garden at the same moment.  His face 
took on an expression of considerable obstinacy.  It was 
clear to his aunt that he was determined to get into the 
gooseberry garden, "only," as she remarked to herself, 
"because I have told him he is not to."

Now the gooseberry garden had two doors by which it 
might be entered, and once a small person like Nicholas 
could slip in there he could effectually disappear from 
view amid the masking growth of artichokes, raspberry 
canes, and fruit bushes.  The aunt had many other things 
to do that afternoon, but she spent an hour or two in 
trivial gardening operations among flower beds and 
shrubberies, whence she could keep a watchful eye on the 
two doors that led to the forbidden paradise.  She was a 
woman of few ideas, with immense powers of concentration.

Nicholas made one or two sorties into the front 
garden, wriggling his way with obvious stealth of purpose 
towards one or other of the doors, but never able for a 
moment to evade the aunt's watchful eye.  As a matter of 
fact, he had no intention of trying to get into the 
gooseberry garden, but it was extremely convenient for 
him that his aunt should believe that he had; it was a 
belief that would keep her on self-imposed sentry-duty 
for the greater part of the afternoon.  Having thoroughly 
confirmed and fortified her suspicions Nicholas slipped 
back into the house and rapidly put into execution a plan 
of action that had long germinated in his brain.  By 
standing on a chair in the library one could reach a 
shelf on which reposed a fat, important-looking key.  The 
key was as important as it looked; it was the instrument 
which kept the mysteries of the lumber-room secure from 
unauthorised intrusion, which opened a way only for aunts 
and such-like privileged persons.  Nicholas had not had 
much experience of the art of fitting keys into keyholes 
and turning locks, but for some days past he had 
practised with the key of the schoolroom door; he did not 
believe in trusting too much to luck and accident.  The 
key turned stiffly in the lock, but it turned.  The door 
opened, and Nicholas was in an unknown land, compared 
with which the gooseberry garden was a stale delight, a 
mere material pleasure.

Often and often Nicholas had pictured to himself 
what the lumber-room might be like, that region that was 
so carefully sealed from youthful eyes and concerning 
which no questions were ever answered.  It came up to his 
expectations.  In the first place it was large and dimly 
lit, one high window opening on to the forbidden garden 
being its only source of illumination.  In the second 
place it was a storehouse of unimagined treasures.  The 
aunt-by-assertion was one of those people who think that 
things spoil by use and consign them to dust and damp by 
way of preserving them.  Such parts of the house as 
Nicholas knew best were rather bare and cheerless, but 
here there were wonderful things for the eye to feast on.  
First and foremost there was a piece of framed tapestry 
that was evidently meant to be a fire-screen.  To 
Nicholas it was a living, breathing story; he sat down on 
a roll of Indian hangings, glowing in wonderful colours 
beneath a layer of dust, and took in all the details of 
the tapestry picture.  A man, dressed in the hunting 
costume of some remote period, had just transfixed a stag 
with an arrow; it could not have been a difficult shot 
because the stag was only one or two paces away from him; 
in the thickly-growing vegetation that the picture 
suggested it would not have been difficult to creep up to 
a feeding stag, and the two spotted dogs that were 
springing forward to join in the chase had evidently been 
trained to keep to heel till the arrow was discharged.  
That part of the picture was simple, if interesting, but 
did the huntsman see, what Nicholas saw, that four 
galloping wolves were coming in his direction through the 
wood?  There might be more than four of them hidden 
behind the trees, and in any case would the man and his 
dogs be able to cope with the four wolves if they made an 
attack?  The man had only two arrows left in his quiver, 
and he might miss with one or both of them; all one knew 
about his skill in shooting was that he could hit a large 
stag at a ridiculously short range.  Nicholas sat for 
many golden minutes revolving the possibilities of the 
scene; he was inclined to think that there were more than 
four wolves and that the man and his dogs were in a tight 
corner.

But there were other objects of delight and interest 
claiming his instant attention: there were quaint twisted 
candlesticks in the shape of snakes, and a teapot 
fashioned like a china duck, out of whose open beak the 
tea was supposed to come.  How dull and shapeless the 
nursery teapot seemed in comparison!  And there was a 
carved sandal-wood box packed tight with aromatic 
cottonwool, and between the layers of cottonwool were 
little brass figures, hump-necked bulls, and peacocks and 
goblins, delightful to see and to handle.  Less promising 
in appearance was a large square book with plain black 
covers; Nicholas peeped into it, and, behold, it was full 
of coloured pictures of birds.  And such birds!  In the 
garden, and in the lanes when he went for a walk, 
Nicholas came across a few birds, of which the largest 
were an occasional magpie or wood-pigeon; here were 
herons and bustards, kites, toucans, tiger-bitterns, 
brush turkeys, ibises, golden pheasants, a whole portrait 
gallery of undreamed-of creatures.  And as he was 
admiring the colouring of the mandarin duck and assigning 
a life-history to it, the voice of his aunt in shrill 
vociferation of his name came from the gooseberry garden 
without.  She had grown suspicious at his long 
disappearance, and had leapt to the conclusion that he 
had climbed over the wall behind the sheltering screen of 
the lilac bushes; she was now engaged in energetic and 
rather hopeless search for him among the artichokes and 
raspberry canes.

"Nicholas, Nicholas!" she screamed, "you are to come 
out of this at once.  It's no use trying to hide there; I 
can see you all the time."

It was probably the first time for twenty years that 
anyone had smiled in that lumber-room.

Presently the angry repetitions of Nicholas' name 
gave way to a shriek, and a cry for somebody to come 
quickly.  Nicholas shut the book, restored it carefully 
to its place in a corner, and shook some dust from a 
neighbouring pile of newspapers over it.  Then he crept 
from the room, locked the door, and replaced the key 
exactly where he had found it.  His aunt was still 
calling his name when he sauntered into the front garden.

"Who's calling?" he asked.

"Me," came the answer from the other side of the 
wall; "didn't you hear me?  I've been looking for you in 
the gooseberry garden, and I've slipped into the rain-
water tank.  Luckily there's no water in it, but the 
sides are slippery and I can't get out.  Fetch the little 
ladder from under the cherry tree - "

"I was told I wasn't to go into the gooseberry 
garden," said Nicholas promptly.

"I told you not to, and now I tell you that you 
may," came the voice from the rain-water tank, rather 
impatiently.

"Your voice doesn't sound like aunt's," objected 
Nicholas; "you may be the Evil One tempting me to be 
disobedient.  Aunt often tells me that the Evil One 
tempts me and that I always yield.  This time I'm not 
going to yield."

"Don't talk nonsense," said the prisoner in the 
tank; "go and fetch the ladder."

"Will there be strawberry jam for tea?" asked 
Nicholas innocently.

"Certainly there will be," said the aunt, privately 
resolving that Nicholas should have none of it.

"Now I know that you are the Evil One and not aunt," 
shouted Nicholas gleefully; "when we asked aunt for 
strawberry jam yesterday she said there wasn't any.  I 
know there are four jars of it in the store cupboard, 
because I looked, and of course you know it's there, but 
she doesn't, because she said there wasn't any.  Oh, 
Devil, you HAVE sold yourself!"

There was an unusual sense of luxury in being able 
to talk to an aunt as though one was talking to the Evil 
One, but Nicholas knew, with childish discernment, that 
such luxuries were not to be over-indulged in.  He walked 
noisily away, and it was a kitchenmaid, in search of 
parsley, who eventually rescued the aunt from the rain-
water tank.

Tea that evening was partaken of in a fearsome 
silence.  The tide had been at its highest when the 
children had arrived at Jagborough Cove, so there had 
been no sands to play on - a circumstance that the aunt 
had overlooked in the haste of organising her punitive 
expedition.  The tightness of Bobby's boots had had 
disastrous effect on his temper the whole of the 
afternoon, and altogether the children could not have 
been said to have enjoyed themselves.  The aunt 
maintained the frozen muteness of one who has suffered 
undignified and unmerited detention in a rain-water tank 
for thirty-five minutes.  As for Nicholas, he, too, was 
silent, in the absorption of one who has much to think 
about; it was just possible, he considered, that the 
huntsman would escape with his hounds while the wolves 
feasted on the stricken stag.


FUR


"YOU look worried, dear," said Eleanor.

"I am worried," admitted Suzanne; "not worried 
exactly, but anxious.  You see, my birthday happens next 
week - "

"You lucky person," interrupted Eleanor; "my 
birthday doesn't come till the end of March."

"Well, old Bertram Kneyght is over in England just 
now from the Argentine.  He's a kind of distant cousin of 
my mother's, and so enormously rich that we've never let 
the relationship drop out of sight.  Even if we don't see 
him or hear from him for years he is always Cousin 
Bertram when he does turn up.  I can't say he's ever been 
of much solid use to us, but yesterday the subject of my 
birthday cropped up, and he asked me to let him know what 
I wanted for a present."

"Now I understand the anxiety," observed Eleanor.

"As a rule when one is confronted with a problem 
like that," said Suzanne, "all one's ideas vanish; one 
doesn't seem to have a desire in the world.  Now it so 
happens that I have been very keen on a little Dresden 
figure that I saw somewhere in Kensington; about thirty-
six shillings, quite beyond my means.  I was very nearly 
describing the figure, and giving Bertram the address of 
the shop.  And then it suddenly struck me that thirty-six 
shillings was such a ridiculously inadequate sum for a 
man of his immense wealth to spend on a birthday present.  
He could give thirty-six pounds as easily as you or I 
could buy a bunch of violets.  I don't want to be greedy, 
of course, but I don't like being wasteful."

"The question is," said Eleanor, "what are his ideas 
as to present-giving?  Some of the wealthiest people have 
curiously cramped views on that subject.  When people 
grow gradually rich their requirements and standard of 
living expand in proportion, while their present-giving 
instincts often remain in the undeveloped condition of 
their earlier days.  Something showy and not-too-
expensive in a shop is their only conception of the ideal 
gift.  That is why even quite good shops have their 
counters and windows crowded with things worth about four 
shillings that look as if they might be worth seven-and-
six, and are priced at ten shillings and labelled 
seasonable gifts.' "

"I know," said Suzanne; "that is why it is so risky 
to be vague when one is giving indications of one's 
wants.  Now if I say to him: 'I am going out to Davos 
this winter, so anything in the travelling line would be 
acceptable,' he might give me a dressing-bag with gold-
mounted fittings, but, on the other hand, he might give 
me Baedeker's Switzerland, or `Skiing without Tears,' or 
something of that sort."

"He would be more likely to say: 'She'll be going to 
lots of dances, a fan will be sure to be useful.' "

"Yes, and I've got tons of fans, so you see where 
the danger and anxiety lies.  Now if there is one thing 
more than another that I really urgently want it is furs.  
I simply haven't any.  I'm told that Davos is full of 
Russians, and they are sure to wear the most lovely 
sables and things.  To be among people who are smothered 
in furs when one hasn't any oneself makes one want to 
break most of the Commandments."

"If it's furs that you're out for," said Eleanor, 
"you will have to superintend the choice of them in 
person.  You can't be sure that your cousin knows the 
difference between silver-fox and ordinary squirrel."

"There are some heavenly silver-fox stoles at 
Goliath and Mastodon's," said Suzanne, with a sigh; "if I 
could only inveigle Bertram into their building and take 
him for a stroll through the fur department!"

"He lives somewhere near there, doesn't he?" said 
Eleanor.  "Do you know what his habits are?  Does he take 
a walk at any particular time of day?"

"He usually walks down to his club about three 
o'clock, if it's a fine day.  That takes him right past 
Goliath and Mastodon's."

"Let us two meet him accidentally at the street 
corner to-morrow," said Eleanor; "we can walk a little 
way with him, and with luck we ought to be able to side-
track him into the shop.  You can say you want to get a 
hair-net or something.  When we're safely there I can 
say: 'I wish you'd tell me what you want for your 
birthday.'  Then you'll have everything ready to hand - 
the rich cousin, the fur department, and the topic of 
birthday presents."

"It's a great idea," said Suzanne; "you really are a 
brick.  Come round to-morrow at twenty to three; don't be 
late, we must carry out our ambush to the minute."

At a few minutes to three the next afternoon the 
fur-trappers walked warily towards the selected corner.  
In the near distance rose the colossal pile of Messrs.  
Goliath and Mastodon's famed establishment.  The 
afternoon was brilliantly fine, exactly the sort of 
weather to tempt a gentleman of advancing years into the 
discreet exercise of a leisurely walk.

"I say, dear, I wish you'd do something for me this 
evening," said Eleanor to her companion; "just drop in 
after dinner on some pretext or other, and stay on to 
make a fourth at bridge with Adela and the aunts.  
Otherwise I shall have to play, and Harry Scarisbrooke is 
going to come in unexpectedly about nine-fifteen, and I 
particularly want to be free to talk to him while the 
others are playing."

"Sorry, my dear, no can do," said Suzanne; "ordinary 
bridge at threepence a hundred, with such dreadfully slow 
players as your aunts, bores me to tears.  I nearly go to 
sleep over it."

"But I most particularly want an opportunity to talk 
with Harry," urged Eleanor, an angry glint coming into 
her eyes.

"Sorry, anything to oblige, but not that," said 
Suzanne cheerfully; the sacrifices of friendship were 
beautiful in her eyes as long as she was not asked to 
make them.

Eleanor said nothing further on the subject, but the 
corners of her mouth rearranged themselves.

"There's our man!" exclaimed Suzanne suddenly; 
"hurry!"

Mr. Bertram Kneyght greeted his cousin and her 
friend with genuine heartiness, and readily accepted 
their invitation to explore the crowded mart that stood 
temptingly at their elbow.  The plate-glass doors swung 
open and the trio plunged bravely into the jostling 
throng of buyers and loiterers.

"Is it always as full as this?" asked Bertram of 
Eleanor.

"More or less, and autumn sales are on just now," 
she replied.

Suzanne, in her anxiety to pilot her cousin to the 
desired haven of the fur department, was usually a few 
paces ahead of the others, coming back to them now and 
then if they lingered for a moment at some attractive 
counter, with the nervous solicitude of a parent rook 
encouraging its young ones on their first flying 
expedition.

"It's Suzanne's birthday on Wednesday next," 
confided Eleanor to Bertram Kneyght at a moment when 
Suzanne had left them unusually far behind; "my birthday 
comes the day before, so we are both on the look-out for 
something to give each other."

"Ah," said Bertram.  "Now, perhaps you can advise me 
on that very point.  I want to give Suzanne something, 
and I haven't the least idea what she wants."

"She's rather a problem," said Eleanor.  "She seems 
to have everything one can think of, lucky girl.  A fan 
is always useful; she'll be going to a lot of dances at 
Davos this winter.  Yes, I should think a fan would 
please her more than anything.  After our birthdays are 
over we inspect each other's muster of presents, and I 
always feel dreadfully humble.  She gets such nice 
things, and I never have anything worth showing.  You 
see, none of my relations or any of the people who give 
me presents are at all well off, so I can't expect them 
to do anything more than just remember the day with some 
little trifle.  Two years ago an uncle on my mother's 
side of the family, who had come into a small legacy, 
promised me a silver-fox stole for my birthday.  I can't 
tell you how excited I was about it, how I pictured 
myself showing it off to all my friends and enemies.  
Then just at that moment his wife died, and, of course, 
poor man, he could not be expected to think of birthday 
presents at such a time.  He has lived abroad ever since, 
and I never got my fur.  Do you know, to this day I can 
scarcely look at a silver-fox pelt in a shop window or 
round anyone's neck without feeling ready to burst into 
tears.  I suppose if I hadn't had the prospect of getting 
one I shouldn't feel that way.  Look, there is the fan 
counter, on your left; you can easily slip away in the 
crowd.  Get her as nice a one as you can see - she is 
such a dear, dear girl."

"Hullo, I thought I had lost you," said Suzanne, 
making her way through an obstructive knot of shoppers.  
"Where is Bertram?"

"I got separated from him long ago.  I thought he 
was on ahead with you," said Eleanor.  "We shall never 
find him in this crush."

Which turned out to be a true prediction.

"All our trouble and forethought thrown away," said 
Suzanne sulkily, when they had pushed their way 
fruitlessly through half a dozen departments.

"I can't think why you didn't grab him by the arm," 
said Eleanor; "I would have if I'd known him longer, but 
I'd only just been introduced.  It's nearly four now, 
we'd better have tea."

Some days later Suzanne rang Eleanor up on the 
telephone.

"Thank you very much for the photograph frame.  It 
was just what I wanted.  Very good of you.  I say, do you 
know what that Kneyght person has given me?  Just what 
you said he would - a wretched fan.  What?  Oh yes, quite 
a good enough fan in its way, but still . . ."

"You must come and see what he's given me," came in 
Eleanor's voice over the 'phone.

"You!  Why should he give you anything?"

"Your cousin appears to be one of those rare people 
of wealth who take a pleasure in giving good presents," 
came the reply.

"I wondered why he was so anxious to know where she 
lived," snapped Suzanne to herself as she rang off.

A cloud has arisen between the friendships of the 
two young women; as far as Eleanor is concerned the cloud 
has a silver-fox lining.


THE PHILANTHROPIST AND THE HAPPY CAT


JOCANTHA BESSBURY was in the mood to be serenely and 
graciously happy.  Her world was a pleasant place, and it 
was wearing one of its pleasantest aspects.  Gregory had 
managed to get home for a hurried lunch and a smoke 
afterwards in the little snuggery; the lunch had been a 
good one, and there was just time to do justice to the 
coffee and cigarettes.  Both were excellent in their way, 
and Gregory was, in his way, an excellent husband.  
Jocantha rather suspected herself of making him a very 
charming wife, and more than suspected herself of having 
a first-rate dressmaker.

"I don't suppose a more thoroughly contented 
personality is to be found in all Chelsea," observed 
Jocantha in allusion to herself; "except perhaps Attab," 
she continued, glancing towards the large tabby-marked 
cat that lay in considerable ease in a corner of the 
divan.  "He lies there, purring and dreaming, shifting 
his limbs now and then in an ecstasy of cushioned 
comfort.  He seems the incarnation of everything soft and 
silky and velvety, without a sharp edge in his 
composition, a dreamer whose philosophy is sleep and let 
sleep; and then, as evening draws on, he goes out into 
the garden with a red glint in his eyes and slays a 
drowsy sparrow."

"As every pair of sparrows hatches out ten or more 
young ones in the year, while their food supply remains 
stationary, it is just as well that the Attabs of the 
community should have that idea of how to pass an amusing 
afternoon," said Gregory.  Having delivered himself of 
this sage comment he lit another cigarette, bade Jocantha 
a playfully affectionate good-bye, and departed into the 
outer world.

"Remember, dinner's a wee bit earlier to-night, as 
we're going to the Haymarket," she called after him.

Left to herself, Jocantha continued the process of 
looking at her life with placid, introspective eyes.  If 
she had not everything she wanted in this world, at least 
she was very well pleased with what she had got.  She was 
very well pleased, for instance, with the snuggery, which 
contrived somehow to be cosy and dainty and expensive all 
at once.  The porcelain was rare and beautiful, the 
Chinese enamels took on wonderful tints in the firelight, 
the rugs and hangings led the eye through sumptuous 
harmonies of colouring.  It was a room in which one might 
have suitably entertained an ambassador or an archbishop, 
but it was also a room in which one could cut out 
pictures for a scrap-book without feeling that one was 
scandalising the deities of the place with one's litter.  
And as with the snuggery, so with the rest of the house, 
and as with the house, so with the other departments of 
Jocantha's life; she really had good reason for being one 
of the most contented women in Chelsea.

From being in a mood of simmering satisfaction with 
her lot she passed to the phase of being generously 
commiserating for those thousands around her whose lives 
and circumstances were dull, cheap, pleasureless, and 
empty.  Work girls, shop assistants and so forth, the 
class that have neither the happy-go-lucky freedom of the 
poor nor the leisured freedom of the rich, came specially 
within the range of her sympathy.  It was sad to think 
that there were young people who, after a long day's 
work, had to sit alone in chill, dreary bedrooms because 
they could not afford the price of a cup of coffee and a 
sandwich in a restaurant, still less a shilling for a 
theatre gallery.

Jocantha's mind was still dwelling on this theme 
when she started forth on an afternoon campaign of 
desultory shopping; it would be rather a comforting 
thing, she told herself, if she could do something, on 
the spur of the moment, to bring a gleam of pleasure and 
interest into the life of even one or two wistful-
hearted, empty-pocketed workers; it would add a good deal 
to her sense of enjoyment at the theatre that night.  She 
would get two upper circle tickets for a popular play, 
make her way into some cheap tea-shop, and present the 
tickets to the first couple of interesting work girls 
with whom she could casually drop into conversation.  She 
could explain matters by saying that she was unable to 
use the tickets herself and did not want them to be 
wasted, and, on the other hand, did not want the trouble 
of sending them back.  On further reflection she decided 
that it might be better to get only one ticket and give 
it to some lonely-looking girl sitting eating her frugal 
meal by herself; the girl might scrape acquaintance with 
her next-seat neighbour at the theatre and lay the 
foundations of a lasting friendship.

With the Fairy Godmother impulse strong upon her, 
Jocantha marched into a ticket agency and selected with 
immense care an upper circle seat for the "Yellow 
Peacock," a play that was attracting a considerable 
amount of discussion and criticism.  Then she went forth 
in search of a tea-shop and philanthropic adventure, at 
about the same time that Attab sauntered into the garden 
with a mind attuned to sparrow stalking.  In a corner of 
an A.B.C. shop she found an unoccupied table, whereat she 
promptly installed herself, impelled by the fact that at 
the next table was sitting a young girl, rather plain of 
feature, with tired, listless eyes, and a general air of 
uncomplaining forlornness.  Her dress was of poor 
material, but aimed at being in the fashion, her hair was 
pretty, and her complexion bad; she was finishing a 
modest meal of tea and scone, and she was not very 
different in her way from thousands of other girls who 
were finishing, or beginning, or continuing their teas in 
London tea-shops at that exact moment.  The odds were 
enormously in favour of the supposition that she had 
never seen the "Yellow Peacock"; obviously she supplied 
excellent material for Jocantha's first experiment in 
haphazard benefaction.

Jocantha ordered some tea and a muffin, and then 
turned a friendly scrutiny on her neighbour with a view 
to catching her eye.  At that precise moment the girl's 
face lit up with sudden pleasure, her eyes sparkled, a 
flush came into her cheeks, and she looked almost pretty.  
A young man, whom she greeted with an affectionate 
"Hullo, Bertie," came up to her table and took his seat 
in a chair facing her.  Jocantha looked hard at the new-
comer; he was in appearance a few years younger than 
herself, very much better looking than Gregory, rather 
better looking, in fact, than any of the young men of her 
set.  She guessed him to be a well-mannered young clerk 
in some wholesale warehouse, existing and amusing himself 
as best he might on a tiny salary, and commanding a 
holiday of about two weeks in the year.  He was aware, of 
course, of his good looks, but with the shy self-
consciousness of the Anglo-Saxon, not the blatant 
complacency of the Latin or Semite.  He was obviously on 
terms of friendly intimacy with the girl he was talking 
to, probably they were drifting towards a formal 
engagement.  Jocantha pictured the boy's home, in a 
rather narrow circle, with a tiresome mother who always 
wanted to know how and where he spent his evenings.  He 
would exchange that humdrum thraldom in due course for a 
home of his own, dominated by a chronic scarcity of 
pounds, shillings, and pence, and a dearth of most of the 
things that made life attractive or comfortable.  
Jocantha felt extremely sorry for him.  She wondered if 
he had seen the "Yellow Peacock"; the odds were 
enormously in favour of the supposition that he had not.  
The girl had finished her tea and would shortly be going 
back to her work; when the boy was alone it would be 
quite easy for Jocantha to say: "My husband has made 
other arrangements for me this evening; would you care to 
make use of this ticket, which would otherwise be 
wasted?"  Then she could come there again one afternoon 
for tea, and, if she saw him, ask him how he liked the 
play.  If he was a nice boy and improved on acquaintance 
he could be given more theatre tickets, and perhaps asked 
to come one Sunday to tea at Chelsea.  Jocantha made up 
her mind that he would improve on acquaintance, and that 
Gregory would like him, and that the Fairy Godmother 
business would prove far more entertaining than she had 
originally anticipated.  The boy was distinctly 
presentable; he knew how to brush his hair, which was 
possibly an imitative faculty; he knew what colour of tie 
suited him, which might be intuition; he was exactly the 
type that Jocantha admired, which of course was accident.  
Altogether she was rather pleased when the girl looked at 
the clock and bade a friendly but hurried farewell to her 
companion.  Bertie nodded "good-bye," gulped down a 
mouthful of tea, and then produced from his overcoat 
pocket a paper-covered book, bearing the title "Sepoy and 
Sahib, a tale of the great Mutiny."

The laws of tea-shop etiquette forbid that you 
should offer theatre tickets to a stranger without having 
first caught the stranger's eye.  It is even better if 
you can ask to have a sugar basin passed to you, having 
previously concealed the fact that you have a large and 
well-filled sugar basin on your own table; this is not 
difficult to manage, as the printed menu is generally 
nearly as large as the table, and can be made to stand on 
end.  Jocantha set to work hopefully; she had a long and 
rather high-pitched discussion with the waitress 
concerning alleged defects in an altogether blameless 
muffin, she made loud and plaintive inquiries about the 
tube service to some impossibly remote suburb, she talked 
with brilliant insincerity to the tea-shop kitten, and as 
a last resort she upset a milk-jug and swore at it 
daintily.  Altogether she attracted a good deal of 
attention, but never for a moment did she attract the 
attention of the boy with the beautifully-brushed hair, 
who was some thousands of miles away in the baking plains 
of Hindostan, amid deserted bungalows, seething bazaars, 
and riotous barrack squares, listening to the throbbing 
of tom-toms and the distant rattle of musketry.

Jocantha went back to her house in Chelsea, which 
struck her for the first time as looking dull and over-
furnished.  She had a resentful conviction that Gregory 
would be uninteresting at dinner, and that the play would 
be stupid after dinner.  On the whole her frame of mind 
showed a marked divergence from the purring complacency 
of Attab, who was again curled up in his corner of the 
divan with a great peace radiating from every curve of 
his body.

But then he had killed his sparrow.


ON APPROVAL


OF all the genuine Bohemians who strayed from time 
to time into the would-be Bohemian circle of the 
Restaurant Nuremberg, Owl Street, Soho, none was more 
interesting and more elusive than Gebhard Knopfschrank.  
He had no friends, and though he treated all the 
restaurant frequenters as acquaintances he never seemed 
to wish to carry the acquaintanceship beyond the door 
that led into Owl Street and the outer world.  He dealt 
with them all rather as a market woman might deal with 
chance passers-by, exhibiting her wares and chattering 
about the weather and the slackness of business, 
occasionally about rheumatism, but never showing a desire 
to penetrate into their daily lives or to dissect their 
ambitions.

He was understood to belong to a family of peasant 
farmers, somewhere in Pomerania; some two years ago, 
according to all that was known of him, he had abandoned 
the labours and responsibilities of swine tending and 
goose rearing to try his fortune as an artist in London.

"Why London and not Paris or Munich?" he had been 
asked by the curious.

Well, there was a ship that left Stolpmunde for 
London twice a month, that carried few passengers, but 
carried them cheaply; the railway fares to Munich or 
Paris were not cheap.  Thus it was that he came to select 
London as the scene of his great adventure.

The question that had long and seriously agitated 
the frequenters of the Nuremberg was whether this goose-
boy migrant was really a soul-driven genius, spreading 
his wings to the light, or merely an enterprising young 
man who fancied he could paint and was pardonably anxious 
to escape from the monotony of rye bread diet and the 
sandy, swine-bestrewn plains of Pomerania.  There was 
reasonable ground for doubt and caution; the artistic 
groups that foregathered at the little restaurant 
contained so many young women with short hair and so many 
young men with long hair, who supposed themselves to be 
abnormally gifted in the domain of music, poetry, 
painting, or stagecraft, with little or nothing to 
support the supposition, that a self-announced genius of 
any sort in their midst was inevitably suspect.  On the 
other hand, there was the ever-imminent danger of 
entertaining, and snubbing, an angel unawares.  There had 
been the lamentable case of Sledonti, the dramatic poet, 
who had been belittled and cold-shouldered in the Owl 
Street hall of judgment, and had been afterwards hailed 
as a master singer by the Grand Duke Constantine 
Constantinovitch - "the most educated of the Romanoffs," 
according to Sylvia Strubble, who spoke rather as one who 
knew every individual member of the Russian imperial 
family; as a matter of fact, she knew a newspaper 
correspondent, a young man who ate BORTSCH with the air 
of having invented it.  Sledonti's "Poems of Death and 
Passion" were now being sold by the thousand in seven 
European languages, and were about to be translated into 
Syrian, a circumstance which made the discerning critics 
of the Nuremberg rather shy of maturing their future 
judgments too rapidly and too irrevocably.

As regards Knopfschrank's work, they did not lack 
opportunity for inspecting and appraising it.  However 
resolutely he might hold himself aloof from the social 
life of his restaurant acquaintances, he was not minded 
to hide his artistic performances from their inquiring 
gaze.  Every evening, or nearly every evening, at about 
seven o'clock, he would make his appearance, sit himself 
down at his accustomed table, throw a bulky black 
portfolio on to the chair opposite him, nod round 
indiscriminately at his fellow-guests, and commence the 
serious business of eating and drinking.  When the coffee 
stage was reached he would light a cigarette, draw the 
portfolio over to him, and begin to rummage among its 
contents.  With slow deliberation he would select a few 
of his more recent studies and sketches, and silently 
pass them round from table to table, paying especial 
attention to any new diners who might be present.  On the 
back of each sketch was marked in plain figures the 
announcement "Price ten shillings."

If his work was not obviously stamped with the hall-
mark of genius, at any rate it was remarkable for its 
choice of an unusual and unvarying theme.  His pictures 
always represented some well-known street or public place 
in London, fallen into decay and denuded of its human 
population, in the place of which there roamed a wild 
fauna, which, from its wealth of exotic species, must 
have originally escaped from Zoological Gardens and 
travelling beast shows.  "Giraffes drinking at the 
fountain pools, Trafalgar Square," was one of the most 
notable and characteristic of his studies, while even 
more sensational was the gruesome picture of "Vultures 
attacking dying camel in Upper Berkeley Street."  There 
were also photographs of the large canvas on which he had 
been engaged for some months, and which he was now 
endeavouring to sell to some enterprising dealer or 
adventurous amateur.  The subject was "Hyaenas asleep in 
Euston Station," a composition that left nothing to be 
desired in the way of suggesting unfathomed depths of 
desolation.

"Of course it may be immensely clever, it may be 
something epoch-making in the realm of art," said Sylvia 
Strubble to her own particular circle of listeners, "but, 
on the other hand, it may be merely mad.  One mustn't pay 
too much attention to the commercial aspect of the case, 
of course, but still, if some dealer would make a bid for 
that hyaena picture, or even for some of the sketches, we 
should know better how to place the man and his work."

"We may all be cursing ourselves one of these days," 
said Mrs. Nougat-Jones, "for not having bought up his 
entire portfolio of sketches.  At the same time, when 
there is so much real talent going about, one does not 
feel like planking down ten shillings for what looks like 
a bit of whimsical oddity.  Now that picture that he 
showed us last week, 'Sand-grouse roosting on the Albert 
Memorial,' was very impressive, and of course I could see 
there was good workmanship in it and breadth of 
treatment; but it didn't in the least convey the Albert 
Memorial to me, and Sir James Beanquest tells me that 
sand-grouse don't roost, they sleep on the ground."

Whatever talent or genius the Pomeranian artist 
might possess, it certainly failed to receive commercial 
sanction.  The portfolio remained bulky with unsold 
sketches, and the "Euston Siesta," as the wits of the 
Nuremberg nicknamed the large canvas, was still in the 
market.  The outward and visible signs of financial 
embarrassment began to be noticeable; the half-bottle of 
cheap claret at dinner-time gave way to a small glass of 
lager, and this in turn was displaced by water.  The one-
and-sixpenny set dinner receded from an everyday event to 
a Sunday extravagance; on ordinary days the artist 
contented himself with a sevenpenny omelette and some 
bread and cheese, and there were evenings when he did not 
put in an appearance at all.  On the rare occasions when 
he spoke of his own affairs it was observed that he began 
to talk more about Pomerania and less about the great 
world of art.

"It is a busy time there now with us," he said 
wistfully; "the schwines are driven out into the fields 
after harvest, and must be looked after.  I could be 
helping to look after if I was there.  Here it is 
difficult to live; art is not appreciate."

"Why don't you go home on a visit?" some one asked 
tactfully.

"Ah, it cost money!  There is the ship passage to 
Stolpmunde, and there is money that I owe at my lodgings.  
Even here I owe a few schillings.  If I could sell some 
of my sketches - "

"Perhaps," suggested Mrs. Nougat-Jones, "if you were 
to offer them for a little less, some of us would be glad 
to buy a few.  Ten shillings is always a consideration, 
you know, to people who are not over well off.  Perhaps 
if you were to ask six or seven shillings - "

Once a peasant, always a peasant.  The mere 
suggestion of a bargain to be struck brought a twinkle of 
awakened alertness into the artist's eyes, and hardened 
the lines of his mouth.

"Nine schilling nine pence each," he snapped, and 
seemed disappointed that Mrs. Nougat-Jones did not pursue 
the subject further.  He had evidently expected her to 
offer seven and fourpence.

The weeks sped by, and Knopfschrank came more rarely 
to the restaurant in Owl Street, while his meals on those 
occasions became more and more meagre.  And then came a 
triumphal day, when he appeared early in the evening in a 
high state of elation, and ordered an elaborate meal that 
scarcely stopped short of being a banquet.  The ordinary 
resources of the kitchen were supplemented by an imported 
dish of smoked goosebreast, a Pomeranian delicacy that 
was luckily procurable at a firm of DELIKATESSEN 
merchants in Coventry Street, while a long-necked bottle 
of Rhine wine gave a finishing touch of festivity and 
good cheer to the crowded table.

"He has evidently sold his masterpiece," whispered 
Sylvia Strubble to Mrs. Nougat-Jones, who had come in 
late.

"Who has bought it?" she whispered back.

"Don't know; he hasn't said anything yet, but it 
must be some American.  Do you see, he has got a little 
American flag on the dessert dish, and he has put pennies 
in the music box three times, once to play the 'Star-
spangled Banner,' then a Sousa march, and then the 'Star-
spangled Banner' again.  It must be an American 
millionaire, and he's evidently got a very big price for 
it; he's just beaming and chuckling with satisfaction."

"We must ask him who has bought it," said Mrs. 
Nougat-Jones.

"Hush! no, don't.  Let's buy some of his sketches, 
quick, before we are supposed to know that he's famous; 
otherwise he'll be doubling the prices.  I am so glad 
he's had a success at last.  I always believed in him, 
you know."

For the sum of ten shillings each Miss Strubble 
acquired the drawings of the camel dying in Upper 
Berkeley Street and of the giraffes quenching their 
thirst in Trafalgar Square; at the same price Mrs. 
Nougat-Jones secured the study of roosting sand-grouse.  
A more ambitious picture, "Wolves and wapiti fighting on 
the steps of the Athenaeum Club," found a purchaser at 
fifteen shillings.

"And now what are your plans?" asked a young man who 
contributed occasional paragraphs to an artistic weekly.

"I go back to Stolpmunde as soon as the ship sails," 
said the artist, "and I do not return.  Never."

"But your work?  Your career as painter?"

"Ah, there is nossing in it.  One starves.  Till to-
day I have sold not one of my sketches.  To-night you 
have bought a few, because I am going away from you, but 
at other times, not one."

"But has not some American - ?"

"Ah, the rich American," chuckled the artist.  "God 
be thanked.  He dash his car right into our herd of 
schwines as they were being driven out to the fields.  
Many of our best schwines he killed, but he paid all 
damages.  He paid perhaps more than they were worth, many 
times more than they would have fetched in the market 
after a month of fattening, but he was in a hurry to get 
on to Dantzig.

When one is in a hurry one must pay what one is 
asked.  God be thanked for rich Americans, who are always 
in a hurry to get somewhere else.  My father and mother, 
they have now so plenty of money; they send me some to 
pay my debts and come home.  I start on Monday for 
Stolpmunde and I do not come back.  Never."

"But your picture, the hyaenas?"

"No good.  It is too big to carry to Stolpmunde.  I 
burn it."

In time he will be forgotten, but at present 
Knopfschrank is almost as sore a subject as Sledonti with 
some of the frequenters of the Nuremberg Restaurant, Owl 
Street, Soho.