ce or
twice, I do not so much wonder at a remark or suggestion from those who
have nothing better to do than study their neighbors.

I ought to have told the reader before this that I found, as I
suspected, that our innocent-looking Scheherezade was at the bottom of
the popgun business. I watched her very closely, and one day, when the
little monkey made us all laugh by stopping the Member of the Haouse in
the middle of a speech he was repeating to us,--it was his great effort
of the season on a bill for the protection of horn-pout in Little Muddy
River,--I caught her making the signs that set him going. At a slight
tap of her knife against her plate, he got all ready, and presently I
saw her cross her knife and fork upon her plate, and as she did so, pop!
went the small piece of artillery. The Member of the Haouse was just
saying that this bill hit his constitooents in their most vital--when
a pellet hit him in the feature of his countenance most exposed to
aggressions and least tolerant of liberties. The Member resented this
unparliamentary treatment by jumping up from his chair and giving the
small aggressor a good shaking, at the same time seizing the implement
which had caused his wrath and breaking it into splinters. The Boy
blubbered, the Young Girl changed color, and looked as if she would cry,
and that was the last of these interruptions.

I must own that I have sometimes wished we had the popgun back, for it
answered all the purpose of "the previous question" in a deliberative
assembly. No doubt the Young Girl was capricious in setting the little
engine at work, but she cut short a good many disquisitions that
threatened to be tedious. I find myself often wishing for her and her
small fellow-conspirator's intervention, in company where I am supposed
to be enjoying myself. When my friend the politician gets too far into
the personal details of the quorum pars magna fui, I find myself all
at once exclaiming in mental articulation, Popgun! When my friend the
story-teller begins that protracted narrative which has often emptied
me of all my voluntary laughter for the evening, he has got but a very
little way when I say to myself, What wouldn't I give for a pellet from
that popgun! In short, so useful has that trivial implement proved as a
jaw-stopper and a boricide, that I never go to a club or a dinner-party,
without wishing the company included our Scheherezade and That Boy with
his popgun.

How clearly I see