olutely silently, and I dared not meet his glance
because I knew I should give myself away. The rascal has not been
running his eye over young women all these years without being able to
spot them in a moment, even in navvy's clothes.

At last I could stand it no longer. "Damn it," I said, "what are you
doing? Why don't you go? I didn't send for you." But still I didn't dare
look up.

"I thought perhaps you had something to say to me, Sir," he said.

"No, I haven't," I replied. "Why should I? What about?"

"Only about those two young men, Sir," he replied.

"Get out," I said; but before he could go I had burst into laughter.

"Better not mention it," I managed to say.

He promised.

There--won't you find that useful?

Yours, C. S.

* * * * *

A VERY RARE BIRD.

Brown lives next door but one to me. His speciality is birds, and he
must be a frightful nuisance to them. I shouldn't care to be a bird if
Brown knew where my nest was. It isn't that he takes their eggs. If he
would merely rob them and go away it wouldn't matter so much. They could
always begin again after a decent interval. But a naturalist of the
modern school doesn't want a bird's eggs; he wants to watch her sitting
on them. Now sitting is a business that demands concentration, a strong
effort of the will and an undistracted mind. How on earth is a bird to
concentrate when she knows perfectly well that Brown, disguised as a
tree or a sheep or a haycock, is watching her day after day for hours at
a stretch and snap-shotting her every five minutes or so for some
confounded magazine? In nine cases out of ten she lets her thoughts
wander and ends half unconsciously by posing, with the result that most
of her eggs don't hatch out.

Brown has a highly-trained sense of hearing. You and I, of course,
possess pretty good ears for ordinary purposes. We can catch as soon as
anyone else that muffled midnight hum, as of a distant threshing-machine
beneath a blanket, which advertises the approach of the roaming Zepp.
From constant practice, too, we have learnt, sitting in our drawing room
or study, to distinguish the crash of the overturned nursery table
upstairs from the duller, less resonant thud of baby's head as it
strikes the floor. But can we positively state from the note of the
blackbird at the bottom of the garden whether it has three, four or five
eggs in its nest, or indeed if it is a house-holder at all? No, we
ca