cals want me to pay on sixty thousand
feet! It's preposterous. We couldn't have got through so much if we had
never let a burner or a stove go out day or night. And we're economical!
What do you say to that?"

The thin man said that he had never heard anything so infamous in his
life.

"But I'm going to fight it, I can tell you," said the fat man. "Oh yes.
If necessary I'll take it to the House of Lords."

"Quite right," said the thin man, picking up his paper.

The second case was late at night, in the corner of a restaurant. Two
men were talking near me and I heard most of it.

"It was like this," said one, who might have been a journalist from the
look of him, to the other, whom I could not exactly place, but fancied
he was perhaps remotely connected with music. He yawned rather more than
I should have liked had I been the narrator. "It was like this. There
were eight of us to dinner and five of us had old brandy at two bob a
go. Only five. The first lot was poured out by the waiter, so there can
be no trouble over that; that's ten bob. Then three or four of us had
another go. Do you see?"

The musician came back to earth and said that he saw.

"Very well. Even supposing that we did overpour a little, we didn't have
more than ten portions altogether. That I can swear to. Yet what do you
think the bill said? 'Liqueurs, two pounds.' Think of it!"

The musician woke up and made the motions of a man thinking of it and
finding it the limit.

"Of course I refused to pay," the journalist went on.

"Of course," said the musician.

"And now we're fighting it. But I don't care if it breaks me, I'll
resist it. If necessary I'll take it to the House of Lords."

The third case happened only this morning. I met in the street an artist
friend.

"Hullo," I said, "I don't often see you out and about at this hour when
there's so little decent daylight."

"No," he said, "it's an awful bore, but I've got to see a lawyer. The
fact is I'm in for litigation."

"You?" I cried.

"Yes, me. It's dead against my nature, I know, but this is serious. In
the public interest a fellow must do something unpleasant now and then."

"What is it?" I asked, drawing him towards a comfortable resort where
cordials against this appalling weather were obtainable.

"The fact is," he said, "my wife's been poisoned."

"Poisoned!"

"I don't mean in the BORGIA way. Not any CATHERINE DE MEDICI tricks.
No, merely in a London restaurant. Out