'A gentleman?' he asked, contracting his brows and eyeing me.

'Well,' said I, with an uncomfortable, nervous laugh, that itself accused my breeding, so inferior it was to the situation, 'possibly you are one of those who mix up the name with moral conduct—'

'To some extent,' he answered, without seeming to interrupt. 'Every one does, I fancy.'

'At any rate I won't challenge it,' said I. 'But you may, if you will, call me a man of some education. I was at Magdalen once, but left Oxford without taking my degree.'

'Ah!' He inclined his head a little to one side. 'Cards?'

'Certainly not,' I answered with heat. 'I own that appearances are against me, but I was never that kind of man. As a matter of fact, it happened over a horse.'

He nodded. 'So you, too, though you won't challenge the name, have to mix up moral conduct with your disposition. We draw the line variously, but every one draws it somewhere. . . . Magdalen, hey? If I mistake not, the foundationers of Magdalen—including, perhaps, some who were undergraduates with you—are assembled in the college hall at this moment to celebrate Christmas, and hear the choir sing Pergolese's "Gloria."'

'The reminder hurts me,' said I—'if that be any gratification to you.'

'A sentimentalist?' Mr Felix's eyes twinkled.

'Better and better! I have the very job for you—but we will discuss that by-and-by. Only let me say that you must have dropped on me, just now, from heaven—you really must. But please don't make a practice of it! I have invested too much in my curios; and others have invested more. . . . That snuff-box, for instance, which you were handling a moment ago . . . at one time in its history it cost— ay, and fetched—close on two hundred millions of money.'

I began to have hopes that I was dealing with a madman.

'Or rather,' he corrected himself, 'the money was paid for a pinch of the snuff it contains. Open it carefully, if you please! and you will behold the genuine rappee, the very particles over which France fought with Austria. What says Virgil? 'Hi motus animorum atque heac cerlamina tanta Pulveris exigui jactu'—yes, but in this instance, you see, the pinch of dust was the exciting cause. Sir, the Austrian ambassador, one fatal afternoon, refused to take from the box in your hand that which, three weeks later, and all too late, he would gladly have purchased with many millions. Observe the imperial crown on the lid, with the bees around it, as if to illustrate Virgil's warning. I bought the thing myself, sir, for six napoleons, off a dealer in the Rue du Fouarre: but the price will rise again. Yes, certainly, I count on its fetching three hundred pounds at least when I have departed this life, and three hundred pounds will go some little way towards my monument.'

'Your monument?' I echoed.

He nodded again. 'In good time, my friend, you shall hear about it; for you make, I perceive, a good listener. You have gifts, though you do less than justice to them. Suffice it to say that I am a sentimentalist, like yourself. I never married nor begat children; and I have but a shaky belief in the future state; but my sentimentality hankers after—you may even say it postulates—some kind of continuity. I cannot discuss this here and now, for by the sound of the violins, the dance is coming to an end, and my guests will be growing impatient. But you remember Samson's riddle? Well, out of my corpse (I trust) shall come forth honey: whereas out of yours, unless you employ your talents better—' He broke off, and stepped close up to me. 'Ah, but excuse me,' he said, and reaching out a hand, caught me suddenly by the collar.

The arrest—I made sure it was an arrest—took me unprepared, and threw me off my balance. I broke away a pace, drawing back my fist to strike: and in that moment I felt his hand relax with a curious fluttering movement as though his fingers drummed on the back of my neck. I heard him laugh too: and before I could hit out he sprang back, holding in his hand a white rabbit!

'An old trick—eh?—and a simple one.' He pressed out the spring of his opera hat, dropped the rabbit inside, dived his hand after it, and drew out two white rabbits by the ears. 'But it will amuse my young friends downstairs, and I practise this kind of thing at odd whiles.'

He set the rabbits on the floor, where they gave themselves a shake, and hopped off towards the shelter of the window-curtains.

'Now you are the very man I wanted,' said he, 'and I am going to make you sing for your supper.' He stepped to the armoire, and drew out a long cloak of scarlet, furred with ermine. 'I had meant to wear this myself,' he went on; but stopped all of a sudden at sight of my face, and began to laugh quietly, in a way that made me long to take him by the throat. 'Dear me, dear me! I understand! Association of ideas—Court of Assize, eh? But this is no judicial robe, my friend: it belongs to Father Christmas. Here's his wig now—quite another sort of wig, you perceive—with a holly wreath around it. And here's his beard, beautifully frosted with silver.' He held wig and beard towards the window, and let the moonlight play over them. 'On with them, quick! . . . And the boots.' Again he dived into the armoire, and produced a pair of Bluchers, the long ankle leathers gummed over with cotton-wool, to represent snow. 'It's lucky they reach a good way up the leg, seeing the cloak is a trifle short for a man of your inches.' He stepped back a pace and surveyed me as I fitted on the beard.

'There are punishments and punishments,' said I. 'And I hope, whatever your game may be, you will remember that there's punishment in dressing up like a tom-fool.'

'Ah, but you'll catch the spirit of it!' he assured me: and then, rubbing his hands, he appeared to muse for a moment. 'I ought,' said he, with a glance towards the fireplace, 'I really ought to send Father Christmas down by way of the chimney. The flue opens just above here, and I believe it would accommodate you; but I am not very sure if my housekeeper had it swept last spring. No,' he decided, 'the music has ceased, and we must lose no time. I will spare you the chimney.'

He called to his rabbits, picked them up as they came hopping from behind the curtains, popped them into his hat, shut it with a snap, and lo! they had vanished.

'You'll excuse me,' I ventured, as he stepped to the door; 'but—but the—the few articles here in the bag—'

'Oh, bring them along with you: bring them along by all means! We may have a present or two to make, down below.'

From the head of the staircase we looked down into a hall gaily lit with paper lanterns. Holly and ivy wreathed the broad balustrade, and the old pictures around the walls. A bunch of mistletoe hung from a great chandelier that sparkled with hundreds of glass prisms, and under it a couple of footmen in gilt liveries and powder crossed at that moment with trays of jellies and syllabubs.

They were well-trained footmen, too; for at sight of me descending the stairs in my idiotic outfit they betrayed no surprise at all. One of them set his tray down on a table, stepped neatly ahead as Mr Felix reached the lowest stair, and opened a door for us on the right. I found myself at a stand on the threshold, blinking at a blaze of light, and staring up a perspective of waxed floor at a miniature stage which filled the far end of the room. Light, as every one knows, travels farther than sound: were it not so, I should say that almost ahead of the blaze there broke on us a din of voices—of happy children's voices. Certainly it stunned my ears before I had time to blink.

The room was lined with children—scores of children: and some of them were gathered in little groups, and some of them, panting and laughing from their dance, had dropped into the chairs ranged along the walls. But these were the minority. The most of the guests lay in cots, or sat with crutches beside them, or with hands dropped in their laps. These last were the blind ones. I do not set up to be a lover of children: but the discovery that the most of these small guests were crippled hit me with a kind of pitiful awe; and right on top of it came a second and worse shock, to note how many of them were blind.

To me these blind eyes were the only merciful ones, as Mr Felix beckoned Father Christmas to follow him up to the stage between the two lines of curious gazers. 'O—oh!' had been their first cry as they caught sight of me in the doorway: and 'O—oh!' I heard them murmuring, child after child, in long-drawn fugue, as we made our way up the long length of the room that winked detection from every candle, every reflector, every foot of its polished floor.

We gained the stage together by a short stairway draped with flags. Mr Felix with a wave of his opera-hat, called on the orchestra to strike up 'A Fine Old English Gentleman' (meaning me or, if you like it, Father Christmas: and I leave you to picture the fool I looked). Then, stepping to the footlights, he introduced me, explaining that he had met me wandering upstairs, rifling his most secret drawers to fill my bag with seasonable presents for them. Five or six times he interrupted his patter to pluck a cracker or a bon-bon out of my beard, and toss it down to his audience. The children gasped at first, and stared at the magic spoil on the floor. By-and-by one adventurous little girl crept forward, and picked up a cracker, and her cry of delight as she discovered that it was real, gave the signal for a general scramble. Mr Felix continued his patter without seeming to heed it: but his hand went up faster and faster to my beard and wig, and soon the crackers were falling in showers. I saw children snatch them off the floor and carry them to their blind brothers and sisters, pressing them between the wondering, groping hands with assurance that they were real. . . . Mr Felix saw it too, and his flow of words ceased with a gulp, as though a flowing spring gurgled suddenly and withdrew itself underground. 'I am a sentimentalist,' he said to me quickly, in a pause which nobody heeded; for by this time crackers were banging to right and left, and the children shouting together. Their shouts rose to one yell of laughter as, recovering himself, he dived at my neck, and produced the two struggling rabbits. His opera-hat opened with a snap, and in they went. A second later it shut flat again, and they were gone, into thin air. He opened the hat with a puzzled frown, plunged a hand, and dragged forth yard upon yard of ribbon—red, green, white, blue, yellow ribbon, mixed up with packs of playing cards that, with a turn of the hand he sent spinning into air, to fall thick as leaves in Vallombrosa.

'Your turn!' he panted as, at the end of the ribbon he lugged out an enormous cabbage, and trundled it down the room. Catching my bag from me, he shook his cloak over it once, and returned it to my hands, bulging, stuffed full to the brim with toys—dolls, tops, whips, trumpets, boxes of animals, boxes of tin soldiers. . . .

'Father Christmas, now! Make way for Father Christmas!'

The infection took me, and stumbling down from the stage by the stairway, I fell to distributing the largesse left and right. The first bagful carried me less than a third of the way down the room: for I gave with both hands, and, when a blind child fumbled long with a toy, dropped it at his feet, and tried another, and yet another till his smile suited me. The dropped toys lay where they had fallen. The spirit of the game had made me reckless; and I halted with a cold shiver as my fingers touched the gems at the bottom of the bag, and, looking down the room, I was aware that my store was exhausted, and as yet two-thirds of the children had received no gift. I turned—all in a cold shiver—to retrace my steps and pick up the toys at the blind children's feet, and as I did so, felt myself a bungler past pardon. But in the act of turning, I cast a look back at the stage: and there stood Mr Felix, nodding approval and beckoning. So, as in a dream, I went back, 'Capital!' was his only comment. Taking my bag, he passed his cloak over it again, and again handed it to me, stuffed to the brim.

Thrice I returned to him; but the third refill was a scanty one, since by this time there lacked but half a score of the taller children to be satisfied. To these, too, I distributed their gifts, and when every eager pair of hands had been laden, I wheeled about for the next word of command.

But Mr Felix had skipped down from the stage, letting the curtain fall behind him. He stood with his back to me, waving both arms to the orchestra; and as the musicians plunged at the opening bars of the Toy Symphony, the curtain rose, almost as soon as it had dropped; and rose upon a scene representing a street with shops decked for Christmas, and snow upon their eaves and window ledges.

Then, still to the strains of the Toy Symphony, a Harlequin ran in, with a Columbine, whom he twisted upon his bent knee, and tossed lightly through the upper window of a baker's shop, himself diving a moment later, with a slap of his wand, through the flap of the fishmonger's door, hard by. Next, as on a frozen slide, came the Clown, with red-hot poker, the Pantaloon tripping over his stick, and two Constables wreathed in strings of sausages. The Clown boxed the Pantaloon's ears; the Pantaloon passed on the buffet to the Constables, and all plunged together into the fishmonger's. The Clown emerged running with a stolen plaice, passed it into the hands of the Pantaloon, who followed, and was in turn pursued off the scene by the Constables: but the fishmonger, issuing last in chase, ran into the Clown, who caught up a barrel of red herrings and bonneted him. The fishmonger extricated himself, and the two began to pelt each other with herrings, while the children screamed with laughter. . . .

It was a famous harlequinade; and, as usual, it concluded the entertainment. For after a harlequinade, what can stand between a child and happy dreams?—especially if he go to them with his arms full of Christmas presents. Five minutes after the curtain had fallen I found myself standing beside Mr Felix in the hall, while he bade good-night to his guests. Carriages of his hiring had arrived for them, and the coachmen apparently had received their orders. A dozen well-trained nurses moved about the hall, and, having dressed the little ones—who by this time were almost too drowsy with pleasure to thank their entertainer—carried them out into the portico, where the liveried footmen stood by the carriage doors. Slam! went the doors, and one after another—with scarcely a word of command-the carriages bowled off over the thick snow.

When the last guest had gone, Mr Felix turned to me.

'The play is over,' said he. 'When I am gone, it will be repeated year after year at Christmas, at the Cripples' Hospital. My will provides for that, and that will be my monument. But for a few years to come I hope to hold the entertainment here, in my own house. Come, you may take off your robe and wig and go in peace. I would fain have a talk with you, but I am tired, as perhaps you may guess. Go, then—and go in peace!'

Motioning the footman to fall back, he walked out with me and down the steps of the portico; but halted on the lowest step by the edge of the frozen snow, and with a wave of the hand dismissed me into the night.

I had gained the end of the street and the bridge that there spans the river before it occurred to me that I was carrying my bag, and— with a shock—that my bag still held the stolen jewels.

By the second lamp on the bridge I halted, lifted the bag on to the snow-covered parapet, thrust in a hand, and drew forth—a herring!

Herrings—red herrings—filled the bag to the brim. I dragged them forth, and rained handful after handful overboard into the black water. Still, below them, I had hopes to find the jewels. But the jewels were gone. At least, I supposed that all were gone, when— having jettisoned the last herring—I groped around the bottom of the bag.

Something pricked my finger. I drew it out and held it under the lamp-light. It was a small turquoise brooch, set around with diamonds.

For at least two minutes I stared at it, there, under the lamp; had slipped it half-way into my waistcoat pocket; but suddenly took a new resolve, and walked back along the street to the house.

Mr Felix yet stood on the lower step of the portico. Above him, still as a statue, a footman waited at the great house-door, until it should please his master to re-enter.

'Excuse me, sir—' I began, and held up the brooch.

'I meant it for you,' said Mr Felix quietly, affably. 'I gave precisely five pounds for it, at an auction, and I warn you that it is worth just thrice that sum. Still, if you would prefer ready-money, as in your circumstances I dare say you do,—he felt in his breeches pocket—'here are the five sovereigns, and—once more— go in peace.'



THE MAYOR'S DOVECOT: A CAUTIONARY TALE.

In the first quarter of the nineteenth century there lived at Dolphin House, Troy, a Mr Samuel Pinsent, ship-chandler, who by general consent was the funniest fellow that ever took up his abode in the town. He came originally from somewhere in the South Hams, but this tells us nothing, for the folk of the South Hams are a decent, quiet lot, and you might travel the district to-day from end to end without coming across the like of Mr Pinsent.

He was, in fact, an original. He could do nothing like an ordinary man, and he did everything jocosely, with a wink and a chuckle. To watch him, you might suppose that business was a first-class practical joke, and he invariably wound up a hard bargain by slapping his victim on the back. Some called him Funny Pinsent, others The Bester. Few liked him. Nevertheless he prospered, and in 1827 was chosen mayor of the borough.

In person, Mr Pinsent was spare and diminutive, with a bald head, a tuft of badger-gray hair over either ear, and a fresh-coloured, clean-shaven face, extraordinarily wrinkled about the face and at the corners of the eyes, which twinkled at you from under a pair of restless stivvery eyebrows. You had only to look at them and note the twitch of his lips to be warned of the man's facetiousness.

Mr Pinsent's office—for he had no shop-front, and indeed his stock-in-trade was not of a quality to invite inspection—looked out upon the Town Square; his back premises upon the harbour, across a patch of garden, terminated by a low wall and a blue-painted quay-door. I call it a garden because Mr Pinsent called it so; and, to be sure, it boasted a stretch of turf, a couple of flower-beds, a flagstaff, and a small lean-to greenhouse. But casks and coils of manilla rope, blocks, pumps, and chain-cables, encroached upon the amenities of the spot—its pebbled pathway, its parterres, its raised platform overgrown with nasturtiums, where Mr Pinsent sat and smoked of an evening and watched the shipping; the greenhouse stored sacks of ship-bread as well as pot-plants; and Mrs Salt, his housekeeper (he was unmarried), had attached a line to the flagstaff, and aired the washing thereon.

But the pride of the garden was its dovecote, formed of a large cider-barrel on a mast. The barrel was pierced with pigeon-holes, and fitted with ledges on which the birds stood to preen themselves. Mr Pinsent did not profess himself a fancier. His columbarium—a mixed collection of fantails and rocketers—had come to him by a side-wind of business, as offset against a bad debt; but it pleased him to sit on his terrace and watch the pretty creatures as they wheeled in flight over the harbour and among the masts of the shipping. They cost him nothing to keep, for he had always plenty of condemned pease on hand; and they multiplied in peace at the top of their mast, which was too smooth for any cat to climb.

One summer's night, however, about midway in the term of his mayoralty, Mr Pinsent was awakened from slumber by a strange sound of fluttering. It came through the open window from the garden, and almost as he sat up in bed and rubbed his eyes it warned him that something serious was amiss with his dovecote. He flung off the bed-clothes and made a leap for the window.

The night was warm and windless, with a waning moon in the east, and as yet no tremble of the dawn below it. Around the foot of the dovecote the turf lay in blackest shadow; but a moon-ray overtopping the low ridge of Mr Garraway's back premises (Mr Pinsent's next-door neighbour on the left), illuminated the eastern side of the barrel, the projecting platform on which it rested, and a yard or more of the mast, from its summit down—or, to be accurate, it shed a pale radiance on a youthful figure, clinging there by its legs, and upon a hand and arm reaching over the platform to rob the roost.

'You infernal young thief!' shouted Mr Pinsent.

As his voice broke upon the night across the silent garden, the hand paused suddenly in the act of dragging forth a pigeon which it had gripped by the neck. The bird, almost as suddenly set free, flapped across the platform, found its wings and scuffled away in flight. The thief—Mr Pinsent had been unable to detect his features-slid down the mast into darkness, and the darkness, a moment later, became populous with whispering voices and the sound of feet stealing away towards the yet deeper shadow of Mr Garraway's wall.

'Who goes there?' challenged Mr Pinsent again. 'Villains! Robbers! You just wait till I come down to you! I've a gun here, by George! and if you don't stand still there and give me your names—'

But this was an empty threat. Mr Pinsent, though nothing of a sportsman, did indeed possess a gun, deposited with him years ago as security against a small loan. But it hung over the office chimney-piece downstairs, and he could not have loaded it, even if given the necessary powder and shot. Possibly the boys guessed this. At any rate, they made no answer.

Possibly, too (for a white nightcap and nightshirt were discernible in almost pitchy darkness), they saw him strut back from the window to slip downstairs and surprise them. Mr Pinsent paused only to insert his feet into a pair of loose slippers, and again, as he unbolted the back door, to snatch a lantern off its hook. Yet by the time he ran out upon the garden the depredators had made good their escape.

He groped inside the lantern for the tinder-box, which lay within, handy for emergencies; found it, and kneeling on the grass-plot beside the mast, struck flint upon steel. As he blew upon the tinder and the faint glow lit up his face and nightcap, a timorous exclamation quavered down from one of the upper windows.

'Oh, sir! Wha—whatever is the matter?' It was the voice of Mrs Salt, the housekeeper.

For a moment Mr Pinsent did not answer. In the act of thrusting the brimstone match into the lantern his eye had fallen on a white object lying on the turf and scarcely a yard away—a white fan-tail pigeon, dead, with a twisted neck. He picked up the bird and stared around angrily into the darkness.

'Robbery is the matter, ma'am,' he announced, speaking up to the unseen figure in the window. 'Some young ruffians have been stealing and killing my pigeons. I caught 'em in the act, and a serious matter they'll find it.' Here Mr Pinsent raised his voice, in case any of the criminals should be lurking within earshot. 'I doubt, ma'am, a case like this will have to go to the assizes.'

'Hadn't you better put something on?' suggested another voice, not Mrs Salt's, from somewhere on the left.

'Eh?' Mr Pinsent wheeled about and peered into the darkness. 'Is that you, Garraway?'

'It is,' answered Mr Garraway from his bedroom window over the wall. 'Been stealin' your pigeons, have they? Well, I'm sorry; and yet in a way 'tis a relief to my mind. For, first along, seeing you, out there, skipping round in your shirt with a lantern, I'd a fear you had been taken funny in the night!'

'Bless the man!' said Mr Pinsent. 'Do you suppose I'd do this for a joke?'

I don't know,' responded Mr Garraway, with guarded candour. 'I feared it. But, of course, if they've stolen your pigeons, 'tis another matter. A very serious matter, as you say, and no doubt your being mayor makes it all the worse.'

Now this attitude of Mr Garraway conveyed a hint of warning, had Mr Pinsent been able to seize it. The inhabitants of Troy have, in fact, a sense of humour, but it does not include facetiousness. On the contrary, facetiousness affronts and pains them. They do not understand it, and Mr Pinsent understood nothing else. Could he have been told that for close upon twenty years he had been afflicting his neighbours with the pleasantries he found so enjoyable, his answer had undoubtedly been 'The bigger numskulls they!' But now his doom was upon him.

He ate his breakfast that morning in silence. Mrs Salt, burning to discuss the robbery, set down the dishes with a quite unnecessary clatter, but in vain. He scarcely raised his head.

'Indeed, sir, and I've never known you so upset,' she broke out at length, unable to contain herself longer. 'Which I've always said that you was wonderful, the way you saw the bright side of everything and could pass it off with a laugh.'

'Good Lord!' said Mr Pinsent testily. 'Did I ever call midnight robbery a laughing matter?'

'No—o,' answered Mrs Salt, yet as one not altogether sure. 'And I dare say your bein' mayor makes you take a serious view.'

Breakfast over, the mayor took hat and walking-stick for his customary morning stroll along the street to Butcher Trengrove's to choose the joint for his dinner and pick up the town's earliest gossip. It is Troy's briskest hour; when the dairy carts, rattling homeward, meet the country folk from up-the-river who have just landed at the quays and begun to sell from door to door their poultry and fresh eggs, vegetables, fruit, and nosegays of garden flowers; when the tradesmen, having taken down their shutters, stand in the roadway, admire the effect of their shop-windows and admonish the apprentices cleaning the panes; when the children loiter and play at hop-scotch on their way to school, and the housewives, having packed them off, find time for neighbourly clack over the scouring of door-steps.

It might be the mayor's fancy and no more, but it certainly appeared to him that the children smiled with a touch of mockery as they met him and saluted. For aught he knew any one of these grinning imps— confound 'em!—might be implicated in the plot. The townsmen gave him 'good-morning' as usual, and yet not quite as usual. He felt that news of the raid had won abroad; that, although shy of speaking, they were studying his face for a sign. He kept it carefully cheerful; but came near to losing his temper when he reached Trengrove's shop to find Mr Garraway already there and in earnest conversation with the butcher.

'Ah! good-mornin' again! I was just talkin' about you and your pigeons,' said Mr Garraway, frankly.

'Good-morning, y'r Worship,' echoed Butcher Trengrove. 'And what can I do for y'r Worship this fine morning? I was just allowin' to Mr Garraway here that, seein' the young dare-devils had left you a bird with their compliments, maybe you'd fancy a nice cut of rumpsteak to fill out a pie.'

'This isn't exactly a laughing matter, Mr Trengrove.'

'No, no, to be sure!' Butcher Trengrove composed his broad smile apologetically. But, after a moment, observing Mr Pinsent's face and that (at what cost he guessed not) it kept its humorous twist, he let his features relax. 'I was allowin' though, that if any man could get even with a bit of fun, it would be y'r Worship.'

'Oh, never fear but I'll get even with 'em,' promised his Worship, affecting an easiness he did not feel.

'Monstrous, though! monstrous!' pursued the butcher. 'The boys of this town be gettin' past all control. Proper young limbs, I call some of 'em.'

'And there's the fellow that's to blame,' put in Mr Garraway, with a nod at a little man hurrying past the shop, on the opposite pavement. This was Mr Lupus, the schoolmaster, on his way to open school. 'Hi! Mr Lupus!'

Mr Lupus gave a start, came to a halt, and turned on the shop door a pair of mildly curious eyes guarded by moon-shaped spectacles. Mr Lupus lived with an elderly sister who kept a bakehouse beside the Ferry Landing, and there in extra-scholastic hours he earned a little money by writing letters for seamen. His love-letters had quite a reputation, and he penned them in a beautiful hand, with flourishes around the capital letters; but in Troy he passed for a person of small account.

'I—I beg your pardon, gentlemen! Were you calling to me?' stammered Mr Lupus.

'Good-morning, Lupus!' The mayor nodded to him. 'We were just saying that you bring up the boys of this town shamefully. Yes, sir, shamefully.'

'No, indeed, your Worship,' protested Mr Lupus, looking up with a timid smile, as he drew off his spectacles and polished them. 'Your Worship is pleasant with me. I do assure you, gentlemen, that my boys are very good boys, and give me scarcely any trouble.'

'That's because you sit at school in your daydreams, and don't take note of the mischief that goes on around you. A set of anointed young scoundrels, Mr Lupus!'

'You don't mean it, sir. Oh, to be sure you don't mean it! Your Worship's funny way of putting things is well known, if I may say so. But they are good boys, on the whole, very good boys; and you should see the regularity with which they attend. I sometimes wish—meaning no offence—that you gentlemen of position in the town would drop in upon us a little oftener. It would give you a better idea of us, indeed it would. For my boys are very good boys, and for regularity of attendance we will challenge any school in Cornwall, sir, if you will forgive my boasting.'

Now this suggestion of Mr Lupus, though delicately put, and in a nervous flutter, ought by rights to have hit the mayor and Mr Garraway hard; the pair of them being trustees of the charity under which the Free Grammar School was administered. But in those days few public men gave a thought to education, and Mr Lupus taught school, year in and year out, obedient to his own conscience, his own enthusiasms; unencouraged by visitation or word of advice from his governors.

The mayor, to be sure, flushed red for a moment; but Mr Garraway's withers were unwrung.

'That don't excuse their committing burglary and stealing his Worship's pigeons,' said he. Briefly he told what had happened.

Mr Lupus adjusted and readjusted his spectacles, still in a nervous flurry.

'You surprise me, gentlemen. It is unlike my boys—unlike all that I have ever believed of them. You will excuse me, but if this be true, I shall take it much to heart. So regular in attendance, and— stealing pigeons, you say? Oh, be sure, sirs, I will give them a talking-to—a severe talking-to—this very morning.'

The little schoolmaster went his way down the street in a flutter. Mr Pinsent stared after him abstractedly.

'That man,' said he, after a long pause, 'ought to employ some one to use his cane for him.'

With this, for no apparent reason, his eye brightened suddenly. But the source of his inspiration he kept to himself. His manner was jocular as ever as he ordered his steak.

On his way home he knocked at the door of the town sergeant, Thomas Trebilcock, a septuagenarian, more commonly known as Pretty Tommy. The town sergeant was out in the country, picking mushrooms; but his youngest granddaughter, who opened the door, promised to send him along to the mayor's office as soon as ever he returned.

At ten o'clock, or a little later, Pretty Tommy presented himself, and found Mr Pinsent at his desk engaged in complacent study of a sheet of manuscript, to which he had just attached his signature.

'I think this will do,' said Mr Pinsent, with a twinkle, and he recited the composition aloud.

Pretty Tommy, having adjusted his horn spectacles, took the paper and read it through laboriously.

'You want me to cry it through the town?'

'Certainly. You can fetch your bell, and go along with it at once.'

'Your Worship knows best, o' course.' Pretty Tommy appeared to hesitate.

'Why, what's wrong with it?'

'Nothin',' said Tommy, after a slow pause and another perusal, 'only 'tis unusual—unusual, and funny at the same time; an' that's always a risk.' He paused again for a moment, and his face brightened. 'But there!' he said, ''tis a risk you're accustomed to by this time.'

Half an hour later the sound of the town sergeant's bell at the end of the street called tradesmen from their benches and housewives from their kitchens to hear the following proclamation, to which Tommy had done honour by donning his official robe (of blue, gold-laced) with a scarlet pelisse and a cocked hat. A majestic figure he made, too, standing in the middle of the roadway with spectacles on nose, and the great handbell tucked under his arm—

'O YES! O YES! O YES!

'Take you all notice: that whereas some evil-disposed boys did last night break into the premises of Samuel Pinsent, Worshipful Mayor of this Borough, and did rob His Worship of several valuable pigeons; His Worship hereby offers a reward of Five Shillings to the parent or parents of any such boy as will hand him over, that the Mayor may have ten minutes with him in private. Amen.

'GOD SAVE THE KING!'

Mr Pinsent, seated in his office, heard the bell sounding far up the street, and chuckled to himself. He chuckled again, peering through his wire blinds, when Pretty Tommy emerged upon the square outside and took his stand in the middle of it to read the proclamation. It collected no crowd, but it drew many faces to the windows and doorways, and Mr Pinsent observed that one and all broke into grins as they took the humour of his offer.

He rubbed his hands together. He had been angry to begin with; yes— he would confess it—very angry. But he had overcome it and risen to his reputation. The town had been mistaken in thinking it could put fun on him. It was tit-for-tat again, and the laugh still with Samuel Pinsent.

He ate his dinner that day in high good humour, drank a couple of glasses of port, and retired (as his custom was on warm afternoons) to his back-parlour, for an hour's siesta. Through the open window he heard the residue of his pigeons murmuring in their cotes, and the sound wooed him to slumber. So for half an hour he slept, with an easy conscience, a sound digestion, and a yellow bandanna handkerchief over his head to protect him from the flies. A tapping at the door awakened him.

'There's a woman here—Long Halloran's wife, of Back Street—wishes to see you, sir,' announced the voice of Mrs Salt.

'Woman!' said the mayor testily. 'Haven't you learned by this time that I'm not to be disturbed after dinner?'

'She said her business was important, sir. It's—it's about the pigeons,' explained Mrs Salt.

And before he could protest again, Mrs Halloran had thrust her way into the room and stood curtseying, with tears of recent weeping upon her homely and extremely dirty face. Behind her shuffled a lanky, sheepish-eyed boy, and took up his stand at her shoulder with a look half-sullen, half-defiant.

'It's about my Mike, sir,' began Mrs Halloran, in a lachrymose voice, and paused to dab her eyes with a corner of her apron. 'Which I'm sure, sir, we ought to be very grateful to you for all your kindness and the trouble you're takin', and so says the boy's father. For he's growin' up more of a handful every day, and how to manage him passes our wits.'

'Are you telling me, Mrs Halloran, that this boy of yours is the thief who stole my pigeons?'

Mr Pinsent, looking at the boy with a magisterial frown, began to wish he had not been quite so hasty in sending round the town sergeant.

'You did, didn't you, Mike?' appealed Mrs Halloran. And Mike, looking straight before him, grunted something which might pass for an admission. 'You must try to overlook the boy's manner, sir. He's case-hardened, I fear, and it goes sore to a mother's heart that ever I should rear up a child to be a thief. But as Halloran said to me, "Take the young limb to his Worship," Halloran says, "and maybe a trifle of correction by a gentleman in his Worship's position will have some effect," he says. But I hope, sir, you won't visit all the punishment on Mike, for he didn't do it alone; and though I'm not sayin' he don't deserve all he gets, 'tisn't fair to make him the only scapegoat—now is it, sir?'

'My good woman, I—I have no such intention,' stammered the mayor, glancing at the lad again, and liking his appearance worse than ever.

'I thank your Worship.' Mrs Halloran dropped a quick curtsey. 'And so I made free to tell Halloran, who was in doubt of it. "Mr Pinsent," I said, "is a just-minded man, an' you may be sure," I said, "he'll mete out the same to all, last as well as first."'

'Yes, yes!' The mayor took her up impatiently and paused for a moment, still eyeing the boy. 'Er—by the way, what age is your son?'

'Rising fifteen, sir; christened fifteen years ago last St Michael's Day, which is the twenty-ninth of September, though little good it done him. He takes after his father, sir. All the Hallorans shoot up tall, like runner beans; and thick in the bone. Or so his father says. For my part, I've never been to Ireland; but by the looks of en you'd say not a day less than seventeen. It seems like blood-money, my takin' five shillin' and handin' the child over—at his tender age—and me his own mother that nursed en!'

Here Mrs Halloran, whose emotions had been mastering her for some moments, broke down in a violent fit of sobbing; and this so affected her offspring that he emitted a noise like the hoot of a dog. As he started it without warning, so abruptly he ended it, and looked around with an impassive face.

It was uncanny. It shook the mayor's nerve. 'My dear Mrs Halloran, if you will let me have a word or two with your son—'

'Oh, I know!' she wailed. 'That's how you put it. But you give me over the money, sir, and let me go quick, before I weaken on it. You never had a child of your own, Mr Pinsent—and more's the pity for the child—but with one of your own you'd know what it feels like!'

Mr Pinsent felt in his trouser-pocket, drew forth two half-crowns, and pressed them into Mrs Halloran's dirty palm. With a sob and a blessing she escaped. He heard her run sobbing down the passage to the front door. Then he turned upon Mike.

The boy had sidled round with his back against the wall, and stood there with his left elbow up and his fists half clenched. For the space of half a minute the mayor eyed him, and he eyed the mayor.

'Sit down, Mike,' said the mayor gently.

'Goo! What d'ye take me for?' said Mike, lifting his hands a little.

'Sit down, I tell you.'

'Huh—yes, an' let you cop me over the head? You just try it—that's all; you just come an' try it?'

'I—er—have no intention of trying it,' said Mr Pinsent. 'It certainly would not become me to administer—to inflict—corporal punishment on a youth of your—er—inches. What grieves me—what pains me more than I can say, is to find a boy of your—er-size and er—development—by which I mean mental development, sense of responsibility—er—mixed up in this disgraceful affair. I had supposed it to be a prank, merely—a piece of childish mischief—and that the perpetrators were quite small boys.' (Here—not a doubt of it—Mr Pinsent was telling the truth.)

'Why,' he went on, with the air of one making a pleasant little discovery, 'I shouldn't be surprised to find you almost as tall as myself! Yes. I declare I believe you are quite as tall! No'-he put up a hand as Mike, apparently suspecting a ruse, backed in a posture of defence—'we will not take our measures to-day. I have something more serious to think about. For you will have noticed that while I suspected this robbery to be the work of small thoughtless boys, I treated it lightly; but now that I find a great strapping fellow like you mixed up in the affair, it becomes my business to talk to you very seriously indeed.'

And he did. He sat down facing Mike Halloran across the table, and read him a lecture that should have made any boy of Mike's size thoroughly ashamed of himself; and might have gone on admonishing for an hour had not Mrs Salt knocked again at the door.

'If you please,' announced Mrs Salt, 'here's the Widow Barnicutt from the Quay to see you, along with her red-headed 'Dolphus.'

'Which,' said the Widow Barnicutt, panting in at her heels and bobbing a curtsey, 'it's sorry I am to be disturbin' your Worship, and I wouldn't do it if his poor father was alive and could give 'em the strap for his good. But the child bein' that out of hand that all my threats do seem but to harden him, and five shillin' a week's wage to an unprovided woman; and I hope your Worship will excuse the noise I make with my breathin', which is the assma, and brought on by fightin' my way through the other women.'

Mr Pinsent gasped, and put up a hand to his brow.

'The other women?' he echoed. 'What other women?'

'The passage is full of 'em,' said Mrs Salt, much as though she were reporting that the house was on fire.

'Ay,' said the widow, 'but my 'Dolphus is the guilty one—I got his word for it.'

'There's Maria Bunny,' persisted Mrs Salt, beginning to tick off the list on her fingers, 'Maria Bunny with her Wesley John, and Mary Polly Polwarne with her Nine Days' Wonder, and Amelia Trownce with the twins, and Deb Hicks with the child she christened Nonesuch, thinkin' 'twas out of the Bible; and William Spargo's second wife Maria with her step-child, and Catherine Nance with her splay-footed boy that I can never remember the name of—'

'Oh! send 'em away!' bawled Mr Pinsent. 'Send 'em away before their husbands come home from work and raise a riot!' Then he recollected himself. 'No, fetch 'em all in here, from the street,' said he, dropping into a chair and taking his head in both hands. 'Fetch 'em all in, and let me deal with 'em!'

The town, when it laughed over the story next day, found the cream of the joke in this—Bester Pinsent, in promising Mrs Halloran that her boy should but share punishment with the rest, had forgotten in his agitation of mind to stipulate that the reward should also be divided. As it was, he had paid her the full five shillings, and the rest of the women (there were twenty-four) would be content with nothing less.

But it was really little Mr Lupus, the schoolmaster, that—all unconsciously—had the last word. Trotting past Butcher Trengrove's shop next morning, on his way to open school, Mr Lupus caught sight of his Worship standing within the doorway, halted, and came across the street with a nervous flush on his face.

'Mr Mayor, sir, if I may have a word with you? Begging your pardon, sir, but it lies on my conscience—all night, sir, it has been troubling me—that I boasted to you yesterday of my boys' good attendance. Indeed, sir, it has been good in the past. But yesterday afternoon! Oh, sir, I fear that you were right, after all, and something serious is amiss with the boys of this town!'

I regret that I cannot report here the precise words of Mr Pinsent's reply.



NEWS FROM TROY!

Troy—not for the first time in its history—is consumed with laughter; laughter which I deprecate, while setting down as an impartial chronicler the occasion and the cause of it.

You must know that our venerable and excellent squire, Sir Felix Felix-Williams, has for some years felt our little town getting, as he puts it, 'beyond him.' He remembers, in his father's time, the grass growing in our streets. The few vessels that then visited the port brought American timber-props for the mines out of which the Felix-Williams estate drew its royalties, and shipped in exchange small cargoes of emigrants whom, for one reason or another, that estate was unable to support. It was a simple system, and Sir Felix has often in talk with me lamented its gradual strangulation, in his time, by the complexities of modern commerce.—You should hear, by the way, Sir Felix pronounce that favourite phrase of his 'in my time'; he does it with a dignified humility, as who should say, 'Observe, I am of the past indeed, but I have lent my name to an epoch.'

As a fact the access of a railway to our little port, the building of jetties for the china-clay trade, the development of our harbour which now receives over 300,000 tons of shipping annually—all these have, in ways direct and indirect, more than doubled the old gentleman's income. But to do him justice, he regards this scarcely at all. He sets it down—and rightly—to what he has taken to call on public occasions 'the expansion of our Imperial Greatness'; but in his heart of hearts he regrets his loosening hold on a population that was used to sit under his fig-tree and drink of his cistern. With their growth the working classes have come to prefer self-help to his honest regulation of their weal. There has been no quarrel: we all love Sir Felix and respect him, though now and then we laugh at him a good deal.

There has been no quarrel, I repeat. But insensibly we have lost the first place in his affections, which of late years have concentrated themselves more and more upon the small village of Kirris-vean, around a corner of the coast. By its mere beauty, indeed, any one might be excused for falling in love with Kirris-vean. It lies, almost within the actual shadow of Sir Felix's great house, at the foot of a steep wooded coombe, and fronts with diminutive beach and pier the blue waters of our neighbouring bay. The cottages are whitewashed and garlanded with jasmine, solanum, the monthly rose. Fuchsias bloom in their front gardens; cabbages and runner beans climb the hillside in orderly rows at their backs. The women curtsey to a stranger; the men touch their hats; and the inhabitants are mostly advanced in years, for the young men and maidens leave the village to go into 'good service' with testimonials Sir Felix takes a delight to grant, because he has seen that they are well earned. If you were to stand at the cross-roads in the middle of Eaton Square and say 'Kirris-vean!' in a loud voice, it is odds (though I will not promise) that a score of faces would arise from underground and gaze out wistfully through area-railings. For no one born in Kirris-vean can ever forget it. But Kirris-vean itself is inhabited by grandparents and grandchildren (these last are known in Eaton Square as 'Encumbrances'). It has a lifeboat in which Sir Felix takes a peculiar pride (but you must not launch it unless in fine weather, or the crew will fall out). It has also a model public-house, The Three Wheatsheaves, so named from the Felix-Williams' coat of arms. The people of Troy believe—or at any rate assert—that every one in Kirris-vean is born with a complete suit of gilt buttons bearing that device.

Few dissipations ripple the gentle flow—which it were more descriptive perhaps to call stagnation—of life in that model village. From week-end to week-end scarcely a boat puts forth from the shelter of its weed-coated pier; for though Kirris-vean wears the aspect of a place of fishery, it is in fact nothing of the kind. Its inhabitants—blue-jerseyed males and sun-bonneted females—sit comfortably on their pensions and tempt no perils of the deep. Why should they risk shortening such lives as theirs? A few crab-pots—'accessories,' as a painter would say—rest on the beach above high-water mark, the summer through; a few tanned nets hang, and have hung for years, a-drying against the wall of the school-house. But the prevalent odour is of honeysuckle. The aged coxswain of the lifeboat reported to me last year that an American visitor had asked him how, dwelling remote from the railway, the population dealt with its fish. 'My dear man,' said I, 'you should have told him that you get it by Parcels' Post from Billingsgate.'

I never know—never, in this life shall I discover—how rumour operates in Troy, how it arrives or is spread. Early in August a rumour, incredible on the face of it, reached me that Kirris-vean intended a Regatta! . . . For a week I disbelieved it; for almost another week I forgot it; and then lo! Sir Felix himself called on me and confirmed it.

A trio of young footmen (it appeared) had arrived in Kirris-vean to spend a holiday on board-wages—their several employers having gone northward for the grouse, to incommodious shooting-boxes where a few servants sufficed. Finding themselves at a loose end (to use their own phrase for it) these three young men had hit on the wild—the happy—the almost delirious idea of a Regatta; and taking their courage in their hands had sought an interview with Sir Felix, to entreat his patronage for the scheme. They had found him in his most amiable mood, and within an hour—the old gentleman is discursive—he had consented to become Patron and President and to honour the gathering with his presence. But observe; the idea cannot have originated before August the 12th, on which day the trio arrived from London; yet a whisper of it had reached me on the 2nd or 3rd. I repeat that I shall never understand the operation of rumour in Troy.

Sir Felix, having somewhat rashly given his consent, in a cooler hour began to foresee difficulties, and drove into Troy to impart them to me. I know not why, on occasions of doubt and embarrassment such as this, he ever throws himself (so to speak) on my bosom; but so it is. The Regatta, he explained, ought to take place in August, and we were already arrived at the middle of the month, Tuesday the 24th had been suggested—a very convenient date for him: it was, as I might remember, the day before Petty Sessions, immediately after which he had as good as promised to visit his second son in Devonshire and attend the christening of an infant grandchild. But would ten days allow us time to organise the 'events,' hire a band, issue the necessary posters, etc.?

I assured him that, hard as it might drive us, the thing could be done. 'I shall feel vastly more confident,' he was good enough to say, 'if you will consent to join our Committee.' And I accepted, on the prospect of seeing some fun. But ah! could I have foreseen what fun!

'You relieve my mind, indeed. . . . And—er—perhaps you might also help us by officiating as starter and—er—judge, or timekeeper?'

'Willingly,' said I; 'in any capacity the Committee may wish.'

'They will be more inclined to trust the decisions of one who—er— does not live among them.'

'Is that so?' said I. 'In Kirris-vean, one would have thought—but, after all, I shall have to forgo whatever public confidence depends on the competitors being unacquainted with me, since two-thirds of them will come to you from Troy.'

'You are sure?'

'Quite. Has it not struck you, Sir Felix, that Kirris-vean—ideal spot for a regatta—has in itself neither the boats nor the men for one?'

'We might fill up with a launch of the lifeboat,' he hazarded.

'If one could only be certain of the weather.'

'And a public tea, and a procession of the school children.'

'Admirable,' I agreed. 'Never fear, we will make up a programme.'

'Oh, and—er—by the way, Bates of the Wheatsheaf came to me this morning for an Occasional Licence. He proposes to erect a booth in his back garden. You see no objection?'

'None at all.'

'A most trustworthy man. . . . He could not apply, you see, at our last Petty Sessions because he did not then know that a regatta was contemplated; and the 25th will, of course, be too late. But the licence can be granted under these circumstances by any two magistrates sitting together; and I would suggest that you and I—'

'Certainly,' said I, and accompanied Sir Felix to the small room that serves Troy for an occasional courthouse, where we solemnly granted Bates his licence.

There is a something about Sir Felix that tempts to garrulity, and I could fill pages here with an account of our preparations for the Regatta; the daily visits he paid me—always in a fuss, and five times out of six over some trivial difficulty that had assailed him in the still watches of the night; the protracted meetings of Committee in the upper chamber of the lifeboat-house at Kirris-vean. But these meetings, and the suggestions Sir Felix made, and the votes we took upon them, are they not recorded in the minute-book of the First and Last Kirris-vean Regatta? Yes, thus I have to write it, and with sorrow: there will never be another Regatta in that Arcadian village.

Sir Felix, good man, started with a fixed idea that a regatta differed from a Primrose Fete, if at all, then only in being non-political. He could not get it out of his head that public speeches were of the essence of the festivity; and when, with all the tact at my command, I insisted on aquatics, he countered me by proposing to invite down a lecturer from the Navy League! As he put it in the heat of argument, 'Weren't eight Dreadnoughts aquatic enough for anybody?' But in the voting the three young footmen supported me nobly. They wanted fireworks, and were not wasting any money on lecturers: also there was a feeling in Kirris-vean that, while a regatta could scarcely be held without boat-racing, the prizes should be just sufficient to attract competitors and yet on a scale provoking no one to grumble at the amount of subscribed money lost to the village. A free public tea was suggested. I resisted this largesse; and we compromised on 'No Charge for Bona-fide Schoolchildren'—whatever that might mean—and 'Fourpence a head for Adults.'

The weather prospects, as the moment drew near, filled us with anxious forebodings, for the anti-cyclonic spell showed signs of breaking, and the Sunday and Monday wore lowering faces. But Tuesday dawned brilliantly; and when after a hasty breakfast I walked over to Kirris-vean, I found Sir Felix waiting for me at the top of the hill in his open landau, with a smile on his face, a rose in his button-hole, and a white waistcoat that put all misgivings to shame. 'A perfect day!' he called out with a wave of the hand.

'A foxy one,' I suggested, and pointed out that the wind sat in a doubtful quarter, that it was backing against the sun, that it was light and might at any time die away and cheat us of our sailing matches.

'Always the boats with you!' he rallied me; 'my dear sir, it is going to be perfect. As the song says, "We've got the ships, we've got the men, and we've got the money too." An entire success, you may take my word for it!'

We descended the hill to find the village gay with bunting, the competing boats lying ready off the pier, a sizeable crowd already gathered, and the Committee awaiting us at the beach-head. Each committee-man wore a favour of blue-and-white ribbon, and upon our arrival every hat flew off to Sir Felix, while the band played 'See the Conquering Hero Comes!'

It was, not to put too fine a point on the description, an atrocious band. It had come from afar, from one of the inland china-clay villages, and in hiring it the Committee had been constant to its principle that no more money than was necessary should be allowed to go out of Kirris-vean. Report—malicious, I feel sure—reached me later, that, at the first note of it, an aloe in Sir Felix's gardens, a mile away—a plant noted for blossoming once only in a hundred years-burst into profuse and instantaneous bloom. Sir Felix himself, who abounded all day in happy turns of speech, said the best thing of this band. He said it was sui generis.

He was magnificent throughout. I am not going to describe the Regatta, for sterner events hurry my pen forward. So let me only say that the weather completely justified his cheery optimism; that the breeze, though slight, held throughout the sailing events, and then dropped, leaving the bay glassy as a lake for the rowers; that sports ashore—three-legged races, egg-and-spoon races, sack races, races for young men, races for old women, donkey races, a tug-of-war, a greasy pole, a miller-and-sweep combat—filled the afternoon until tea-time; that at tea the tables groaned with piles of saffron cake and cream 'splitters'; and that when the company had, in Homeric phrase—the only fit one for such a tea—put aside from them the desire of meat and drink, Sir Felix stood up and made a speech.

'It was an admirable speech too. It began with 'My dear friends,' and the exordium struck at once that paternal note which makes him, with all his foibles, so lovable. 'They' must excuse him if he now took his departure; for he had arrived at an age to feel the length of a long day—even of a happy summer's day such as this had been. To be innocently happy—that had used to be the boast of England, of "Merry England "; and he had ever prized happy living faces in Kirris-vean above the ancestral portraits—not all happy, if one might judge from their expressions—hanging on his walls at home.' (Prolonged applause greeted this; and deservedly, for he spoke no more than he meant.) He became reminiscential, and singling out a school-child here and there, discoursed of their grandparents, even of their great-grandparents; recalled himself to pay a series of graceful tributes to all who had contributed to make the day a success; and wound up by regretting that he could not stay for the fireworks.

Dear honest Sir Felix! I can see him now, bareheaded, his white hairs lightly fluttered by the evening breeze that fluttered also the flags above Mr Bates's booth immediately in his rear; the sunset light on his broad immaculate waistcoat; the long tea-tables, with their rows of faces all turned deferentially towards him; the shadows slanting from the trees; the still expanse of the bay, and far across the bay a bank of clouds softly, imperceptibly marshalling.

We cheered him to the echo, of course. At his invitation I walked some way up the hill with him, to meet his carriage. He halted three or four times in the road, still talking of the day's success. He was even somewhat tremulous at parting.

'I shall see you to-morrow, at Tregantick?'—Tregantick is the centre of the eight parishes included in our Petty Sessional Division, and the seat of such justice as I and seven others help Sir Felix to administer.

'Oh, assuredly,' said I.

I watched his carriage as it rounded the bend of the road, and so faced about to return to the village. But I took second thought at sight of the clouds massing across the bay and coming up—as it seemed to me against the wind. They spelt thunder. In spite of my early forebodings I had brought no mackintosh; my duties as a Committee-man were over: and I have reached an age when fireworks give me no more pleasure than I can cheerfully forgo or take for granted. I had, having coming thus far on my homeward way, already more than half a mind to pursue it, when the band started to render the 'Merry Duchess' waltz, with reed instruments a semitone below the brass. This decided me, and I reached my door as the first raindrops fell.

When I awoke next morning it was still raining, and raining hard. The thunderstorm had passed; but a westerly wind, following hard on it, had collected much water from the Atlantic, and the heavens were thick as a blanket. A tramp in the rain, however, seldom comes amiss to me, and I trudged the three miles to the court-house in very cheerful mood, now smoking, now pocketing my pipe to inhale those first delicious scents of autumn, stored up by summer for a long day of downpour.

Our Court meets at 11.15, and I timed myself (so well I know the road in all weathers) to reach the magistrates' door on the stroke of the quarter. Now Sir Felix, as Chairman, makes a point of arriving ten or fifteen minutes ahead of time, for a preliminary chat with the Clerk over the charge-sheet and any small details of business. I was astonished, therefore, when, turning at the sound of wheels, I beheld Sir Felix's carriage and pair descending the street behind me. 'Truly the Regatta must have unsettled his habits,' I murmured; and then, catching the eye of one of the pair of constables posted at the door, I gazed again and stood, as some of my fellow-novelists say, 'transfixed.' For the driver on the box was neither Sir Felix's coachman, nor his second coachman, nor yet again one of his stablemen; but a gardener, and a tenth-down under-gardener at that; in fact, you could scarcely call him even an under-gardener, though he did odd jobs about the gardens. To be short, it was Tommy Collins a hydrocephalous youth generally supposed to be half-baked, or, as we put it in Cornwall, 'not exactly'; and on his immense head, crowning a livery suit which patently did not belong to him, Tommy Collins wore a dilapidated billycock hat.

As the carriage drew up I noted with a lesser shock that the harness was wrongly crossed: and with that, as one constable stepped forward to open the carriage door, I saw the other wink and make a sign to Tommy, who—quick-witted for once—snatched off his billycock and held it low against his thigh on the off-side, pretending to shake off the rain, but in reality using this device to conceal the horrid thing. At the same time the other constable, receiving an umbrella which Sir Felix thrust forth, opened it with remarkable dexterity, and held it low over my friend's venerable head, thus screening from sight the disreputable figure on the box. As a piece of smuggling it was extremely neat; but as I turned to follow I heard Tommy Collins ask, and almost with a groan,—

'Wot's the use?'

Four of our fellow-magistrates were already gathered in the little room at the rear of the court-house: of whom the first to greet our Chairman was Lord Rattley. Lord Rattley, a peer with very little money and a somewhat indecorous past, rarely honours the Tregantick bench by attending sessions; but for once he was here, and at once started to banter Sir Felix on his unpunctuality.

'Very sorry, gentlemen; very sorry—most inexplicable,' stuttered Sir Felix, who suffers from a slight impediment of the speech when hurried. 'Servants at home seemed—conspired—detain me. Jukes'— Jukes is Sir Felix's butler, an aged retainer of the best pattern— 'Jukes would have it, weather too inclement. Poof! I am not too old, I hope, to stand a few drops of rain. Next he brings word that Adamson'—Adamson is (or was) Sir Felix's trusted coachman— 'is indisposed and unable to drive me. "Then I'll have Walters," said I, losing my temper, "or I'll drive myself." Jukes must be failing: and so must Walters be, for that matter. We might have arrived ten minutes ago, but he drove execrably.'

'Reminds me—' began Lord Rattley, when Sir Felix—who is ever nervous of that nobleman's reminiscences, and had by this time divested himself of his Inverness cape, turned to the Clerk and demanded news of a lad discharged at the last Sessions on his own and parents' recognisances, to be given another chance under the eye of our new Probation Officer.

'—Of a coachman I once had called Oke—William Oke,' continued Lord Rattley imperturably. 'Drunken little sot he was, but understood horses. One night I had out the brougham and drove into Bodmin to mess with the Militia. The old Royal Cornwall Rangers messed at the hotel in those days, in the long room they used for Assemblies. About eleven o'clock I sent for my carriage, and along it came in due course. Well, I dare say at that hour I wasn't myself in a condition to be critical of Oke's—'

Sir Felix pulled out his watch, and asked me what I made the time.

'Off we drove,' pursued Lord Rattley, ignoring this hint, 'and I must have dropped asleep at once. When I awoke the blessed vehicle had come to a standstill. I called to Oke—no answer: so by-and-by I opened the carriage door and stepped out. The horses had slewed themselves in towards the hedge and were cropping peaceably: but no Oke was on the box and still no Oke answered from anywhere when I shouted. He had, as a fact, tumbled clean off the box half a mile astern, and was lying at that moment in the middle of the road. At that hour I had no mind to look for him, so I collected the reins somehow, climbed up in front, and drove myself home. I had a butler then by the name of Ibbetson—a most respectable man, with the face of a Bible Christian minister; and, thought I, on my way up the drive, "I'll give Ibbetson a small scare." So coming to the porch, when Ibbetson heard the wheels and cast the door open, I kept my seat like a rock. Pretty well pitch dark it was where I sat behind the lamps. Ibbetson comes down the steps, opens the carriage door and stands aside. After a moment he begins to breathe hard, pops his head into the brougham, then his arm, feels about a bit, and comes forward for a lamp. "My God, Bill!" says Ibbetson, looking up at me in the dark. "What have you done with th' ould devil?"'

'I really think,' suggested Sir Felix hurriedly, 'we ought not to keep the Court waiting.'

So in we filed, and the Court rose respectfully to its feet and stood while we took our seats. The Superintendent of Police—an officer new to our Division—gazed at me with a perfectly stolid face across the baize-covered table. Yet somehow it struck me that the atmosphere in Court was not, as usual, merely stuffy, but electrical; that the faces of our old and tried constabulary twitched with some suppressed excitement; and that the Clerk was fidgeting with an attack of nerves.

'Certain supplementary cases, your Worship,' said he, taking a small sheaf of papers from the hands of his underling, 'too late to be included on the charge-sheet issued.'

'Eh?—Oh, certainly—certainly!' Sir Felix drew his spectacle case from his waistcoat pocket and laid it on the table; took the paper handed to him, and slipped it methodically beneath the sheet of agenda; resumed the business of extracting his spectacles, adjusted them, and gravely opened business.

He had it all to himself. For me, as I, too, received the paper of supplementary cases, my first thought was of simple astonishment at the length of the list. Then my gaze stiffened upon certain names, and by degrees as I recognised them, my whole body grew rigid in my chair. Samuel Sleeman—this was the Superintendent's name—appellant against Isaac Adamson, drunk and disorderly; Ditto against Duncan McPhae, drunk and disorderly; Ditto against Henry James Walters, drunk and disorderly; Ditto against Selina Mary Wilkins, drunk on licensed premises; Ditto against Mary Curtis, drunk on licensed premises; Ditto against Solomon Tregaskis, drunk on highway. . . . There were no less than twenty-four names on the list; and each was the name of a retainer or pensioner of Sir Felix—those aged Arcadians of Kirris-vean.

I glanced along the table and winced as I met Sir Felix's eyes. He was inclining towards me. 'Five shillings and costs will meet this case, eh?' he was asking. I nodded, though without a notion of what case we were hearing. (It turned out to be one of cattle-straying, so no great harm was done.) Beyond him I saw Lord Rattley covering an infernally wicked grin with his arched palm; beyond Lord Rattley two estimable magistrates staring at that fatal supplementary paper as though they had dined and this was a bill they found themselves wholly unable to meet.

Sir Felix from time to time finds his awards of justice gently disputed. No one disputed them to-day. Lord Rattley, whose language is younger than his years, declared afterwards—between explosions of indecent mirth—that we left the floor to the old man, and he waltzed. He fined three parents for not sending their children to school, made out an attendance order upon another, mulcted a youth in five shillings for riding a bicycle without a light, charged a navvy ten shillings and costs for use of indelicate language (total, seventeen and sixpence), and threatened, but did not punish, a farmer with imprisonment for working a horse 'when,' as the charge put it ambiguously, 'in an unfit state.' He wound up by transferring an alehouse licence, still in his stride, beamed around and observed 'That concludes our business, I think—eh, Mr Clerk?'

'Supplementary cases, y'r Worship,' murmured the Clerk. 'If I may remind—paper handed to y'r Worship—'

'Eh? Yes, to be sure—'

'Number of cases, drunk and disorderly: arising—as I understand—out of Regatta held yesterday at Kirris-vean.'

The Superintendent arose. He is an amazingly tall man, and it seemed to me that he took an amazingly long time in arising to his full height.

'Impossible to accommodate them all in the cells, y'r Worship. If I may say so, the police were hard worked all night. Mercifully'—the Superintendent laid stress on the word, and I shall always, when I think of it, remember to thank him—'the most of 'em were blind. We laid 'em out on the floor of the charge-room, and with scarcely an exception, as I am credibly informed, they've come to, more or less.'

'Kirris-vean?' I saw Sir Felix's hands grip the arms of his chair. Then he put them out and fumbled with his papers. Lord Rattley obligingly pushed forward his copy of the list.

'Shall I have the defendants brought into Court at once?' asked the Superintendent. 'The constables tell me that they are—er—mostly, by this time, in a condition to understand, for all practical purposes, the meaning of an oath.'

Sir Felix has—as I have hinted—his foibles. But he is an English gentleman and a man of courage. He gasped, waved a hand, and sat up firmly.

He must have needed courage indeed, as the sorry culprits filed into Court: for I verily believe he felt more shame than they, though their appearance might be held to prove this impossible. The police at about eleven o'clock had raided the booth of that respectable landlord, Mr Bates ('Which,' observed the Superintendent, stonily, 'we may 'ave somethink to say to 'im, as it were, by-and-by') and had culled some of them—even as one picks the unresisting primrose, others not without recourse to persuasion. 'Many of 'em,' the Superintendent explained, 'showed a liveliness you wouldn't believe. It was, in a manner of speaking, beyond anythink y'r Worships would expect.' He paused a moment, cleared his throat, and achieved this really fine phrase: 'It was, for their united ages, in a manner of speaking, a knock-out.'

I see them now as they filed into court—yellow in the gills, shaking between present fear and the ebb of excess. But I see Sir Felix also, a trifle red in the face, gripping the arms of his chair, bending forward and confronting them.

For a moment I imagined he meant to address them as a crowd. But his fine sense of business prevailed, and he signed to the Clerk to read the first charge.

He dealt with the charges, one by one, and in detail. Alone he inflicted the fines, while we sat and listened with eyes glued upon the baize table. And the fines were heavy—too heavy. It was not for us to interfere.

At the end I expected some few words of general rebuke. I believe the culprits themselves would have been glad of a tongue-lashing. But he uttered none. To the end he dealt out justice, none aiding him; and when the business was over, pushed back his chair.

We filed out after him. I believe that he has paid all the fines out of his own pocket.

And Troy laughs. But I believe it is safe to say that, while Sir Felix lives, Kirris-vean will not hold a second Regatta.



COLONEL BAIGENT'S CHRISTMAS.

Outside the railway station Colonel Baigent handed his carpet-bag to the conductor of the hotel omnibus, and stood for a moment peering about in the dusk, as if to take his bearings.

'For The Dragon, sir?' asked the conductor.

'The Dragon?' Yes, certainly,' echoed Colonel Baigent, aroused by the name from the beginnings of a brown study. 'So The Dragon is still standing, eh?'

''Twas standing all right when I left it, twenty minutes ago,' the man answered flippantly; for to-night was Christmas Eve, and English hotel servants do not welcome guests who stay over Christmas.

But the colonel remarked nothing amiss in his tone. In fact, he was not listening. He stared out into the mirk beyond the flare of gas in the entrance-way, slowly bringing his mind to bear on the city at his feet, with its maze of dotted lights. The afternoon had been cold and gusty, with now and then a squall of hail from the north-west. The mass of the station buildings behind him blotted out whatever of daylight yet lingered. Eastward a sullen retreating cloud backed the luminous haze thrown up from hundreds of street-lamps and shop-windows—a haze that faintly silhouetted the clustered roofs. The roofs were wet. The roadway, narrowing as it descended the hill, shone with recent rain.

'You may carry down my bag,' said the colonel. 'I will walk. Somewhere to the right here should be a road leading to Westgate, eh?'

'Tisn't the shortest way,' the conductor objected.

'I have plenty of time,' said the colonel mildly.

Indeed, a milder-looking man for a hero—he had earned and won his V.C.—or a gentler of address, could scarcely be conceived; or an older-fashioned. His voice, to be sure, had a latent tone of command. But the patient face, with its drooping moustache and long gray side-whiskers; the short yet attenuated figure, in a tweed suit of no particular cut; the round felt hat, cheap tie, and elastic-sided boots—all these failed very signally to impress the conductor, who flung the carpet-bag inside the omnibus with small ceremony, and banged the door.

'Right, Bill!' he called.

''Oo is it?' asked the driver, slewing round in the light of his near-side lamp.

'Might be a commercial—if 'twasn't for his bag, and his way of speakin'.'

The omnibus rattled off and down the hill. Colonel Baigent gazed after it, alone beneath the gas-lamp; for the few passengers who had alighted from his train had jostled past him and gone their ways, and his porter had turned back wearily into the station, where express and excursion trains had all day been running the Christmas traffic down to its last lees.

Colonel Baigent gazed after the omnibus, then back through the passage-way leading past the booking-office to the platform. All this was new to him. There had been no such thing as railway or railway station thirty-five years ago, when, a boy of seventeen just emancipated from school, he had climbed to the box-seat of the then famous 'Highflyer' coach, and been driven homewards to a Christmas in which the old sense of holiday mingled and confused itself with a new and wonderful feeling that school was over and done with for ever.

During his Indian exile he had nursed a long affection for the city; had collected and pored over books relating to it and its antiquities; and now, as he left the station and struck boldly into the footway on the right, he found himself surprisingly at home. The path led him over a footbridge, and along between high garden walls. But it led him surely enough to Westgate, and the spot occupied in Norman times (as he recalled) by five bordels or shanties, where any belated traveller ('such as I to-night,' thought the colonel) arriving after the gates were shut, might find hospitality for the love of God. The suburb here lay deserted. He halted, and listened to a footfall that died away into the darkness on his right. He felt at home again—here, wrapped around by the ghostly centuries as by the folds of a mantle, and warm within the folds.

Strange to say, the chill came on him as he passed under the arch of Westgate, and into view of the busy High Street, the lit shops, the passers-by jostling upon the pavements, the running newsboys, the hawkers with their barrows, the soldiers strolling five abreast down the middle of the roadway. Here was the whole city coming and going. Here, precisely as he had left it thirty-five years ago, it sprang back into life again, like an illuminated clockwork. No; he was wrong, of course. It had been working all the while, and without intermission, absorbed in its own business—buying and selling, marrying and giving in marriage. He had dropped out, that was all.

The Christmas decorations, the jollity in the voices exchanging Christmas salutations, aggravated the poor colonel's sense of homelessness, and seemed to mock it. One window displayed a huge boar's head, grinning, with a lemon in its mouth. The proprietor of another had hung his seasonable wares on a small spruce fir, and lit it all over with coloured candles. A poulterer, three doors away, had draped his house-front, from the third story down, with what at first glance appeared to be a single heavy curtain of furs and feathers—string upon string of hares, of pheasants, of turkeys, fat geese, wild ducks.

This prevailing superabundant good cheer did not, however, extend to the visitor, as the colonel discovered, within the doorway of The Dragon. Nor was that doorway the old hospitable entrance through which the stage-coaches had rattled into a paved court lined with red-windowed offices. The new proprietor had blocked all this up with a flight of steps, and an arrangement of mahogany and plate-glass. There remained but the arch under which, these years ago, the stout coachman, as he swung his leaders sharp round to the entry, had warned passengers to duck their heads. The colonel was staring up at it when he became aware of a liveried boots holding the mahogany door open for him at the head of the steps, and with an expression that did not include 'Welcome!' among the many things that it said.

The boots too plainly was sullen, the young lady in the office curt and off-hand, the second and only waiter as nearly as possible mutinous. 'All his blooming companions,' he explained (though not precisely in these words), had departed to spend Christmas in the bosom of their families. He spoke cockney English, and, in reply to a question (for the colonel tried hard to draw him into conversation and dissipate his gloom), confessed that he came from Brixton.

Further than this he would not go. In a mortuary silence, the colonel, seated beneath a gasalier adorned (the mockery of it!) with a sprig of mistletoe, sipped his half-pint of sherry, and ate his way through three courses of a sufficiently good dinner. But better, says Solomon, is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.

Every time he raised his eyes they rested on the table at which he had dined with his father on the eve of being entered at school. The same table, the same heavy mahogany chairs—he recalled the scroll pattern on their backs. He could see himself there in the corner—a small boy, white in the face and weary with travel, divided between surmise of the morrow and tears for the home left behind. He could see his father seated there in profile, the iron-gray hair, the remembered stoop. Well, they were all gone now—all, missing whom that night he had come so near to breaking down and weeping. . . . Mother, sisters, brother, gone one by one during the years of his Indian exile, and himself now left the last of his race, unmarried, and never likely to marry. Why had he come? To revisit his old school? But the school would be closed for the Christmas holidays, the children dispersed to their homes and happy.

Limen amabile Matris et oscula . . .

He had ordered claret—a bottle of Lafitte, the best the house could produce—and the waiter, impressed a little by the choice, now appeared noiselessly, almost deferentially, at his elbow, and poured out a first glassful of the wine.

'Waiter!'

'Yessir!'

'Where does that music come from?'—for the sound of an antiquated piano had been thrumming for some minutes from a distant room. The music was not ambitious—an old set of quadrille tunes. The colonel did not recognise it. He had no ear at all for music, and could just distinguish the quickstep of his regiment from 'God save the Queen.' In fact, when he paid any attention at all to music (and this was rare), it gave him no sensation beyond a vague discomfort.

'It comes from the Assembly Room, sir, at the back of the Court.'

'Ah! yes, I remember the old Assembly Room. Some one is giving a ball to-night?'

The waiter smiled indulgently. 'Oh no, sir! It's Miss Wallas's dancing-class breaking up—that's all.'

'Breaking up?' echoed the colonel, whose mind was sometimes a trifle slow in the uptake.

'She rents the room alternate Fridays, sir, and usually gives 'em a little treat just before Christmas. I don't know,' pursued the waiter, meditatively laying two fingers wide on his chin, 'as many people would call it a treat. But the little 'uns likes dressing up in their evening frocks, and the buns and lemonade is well enough for their time of life. There used to be a fiddle too, as well as the piano; but the class hev fallen off considerable of late. The management don't like it too well. But there's a notion 'twould be unfeelin' to stop it. She's been carrying it on all these years, and her aunt before her. But if it annoys you, sir, I can say a word at the office and get it stopped.'

'Heaven forbid!' said the colonel. But the music made him uncomfortable, nevertheless. It broke off, and started again upon a waltz tune. After the waltz came a mazurka, and after the mazurka another set of quadrilles. And still, as he sipped his claret, the successive tunes wove themselves into old memories haunting the coffee-room—ghostly memories! Yet he had no will to escape them. Outside he could see the crowd jostling to and fro on the opposite pavement. The lights within a chemist's shop, shining through bottles of coloured water in its window, threw splashes of colour— green, crimson, orange—on the eager faces as they went by. Colonel Baigent rose half impatiently, drew down the blind, and, returning to his chair, sat alone with the ghosts.

The waiter brought dessert—a plateful of walnuts and dried figs. He cracked a walnut and peeled it slowly, still busy with his thoughts. For a while these thoughts were all in a far past; but by-and-by a stray thread carried him down to the year 'fifty-seven— and snapped suddenly. His thoughts always broke off suddenly at the year 'fifty-seven—the Mutiny year. In that year he had won his Victoria Cross and, along with it, a curious tone in his voice, an inexpressible gentleness with all women and children, certain ineradicable lines in his face (hidden though they were by his drooping moustache and absurd old-fashioned whiskers); also a certain very grave simplicity when addressing the Almighty in his prayers. But he never thought of the year 'fifty-seven if he could help it. And as a spider, its thread snapping, drops upon the floor, so Colonel Baigent fell to earth out of his dreaming.

With a sudden impulse of his hands against the table's edge, he thrust back the chair and stood erect. His bottle of claret was all but empty, and he bethought him that he had left his cigar-case upstairs. His bedroom lay on the farther side of the courtyard and on his way to it he passed the tall windows of the Assembly Room close enough to fling a glance inside.