imple," 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