ubtedly be, "Well, what d'yer think
yerself, sir?"

Some of those bills are still unpaid. Quarter day is coming round
again, so I expect there will be some more soon. Alas! I am an unlucky
being, born under an unlucky star.

You may think it a strange notion, but I attribute all my ill-luck to
spiders:

"If you wish to live and thrive,
Let a spider run alive."

I am not superstitious as a rule, but I cannot help thinking that my
wholesale massacre of this obnoxious insect has something to do with
my misfortunes by way of retribution.

I hate spiders! Nearly everybody has a pet aversion of some sort. I
have heard people shriek at the sight of a caterpillar, and turn pale
in the neighborhood of a toad. My great antipathy is a spider! Not
that I object to its treatment of flies--nasty little worries, they
deserve everything that happens to them. But it is the _appearance_ of
a spider that is so against it. There is a shifty expression about the
eye, and such a leer on the upper lip. Money spinners are not so
objectionable. I can tolerate them. It is the big, almost tarantulas,
from which I flee. Those creatures which start up suddenly, and run
across the room close by where you are sitting; creatures so large
that you can almost hear their footsteps as they pass.

A man told me once he had found a spider in his room of such enormous
dimensions that he had to open the door in order that it might get
out!

Overdrawn, you say? Well, it sounds a little improbable certainly; not
so much on account of the unusual size of the spider as for the
extraordinary consideration on the part of the man.

CHAPTER III.

ON POLITICS.

Perhaps you don't think me competent to talk about politics? "What do
women know about such things?" asks the superior masculine mind.

Well, they don't know so much as men, I admit, and I earnestly hope
they never will. A woman who is infected with politics is a positive
pest, and should be removed at once. If I do not know anything about
them, at any rate I ought to, as I have been brought up in a raging
Tory household, and so have been steeped in them from my youth up.

There is such a sameness in politicians. Whatever their opinions,
their language and feelings are all one. They are only directed at
different people. While one man is gloating over a Conservative
victory you hear a mutter from the Radical to the effect that "That
_brute_ has got in for ----" Poor man, why, be