ything the boiling of an urn at a
tea-meeting, and awoke in the breasts of my wife and her army an intense
and unconquerable longing for tea, which was accentuated as four o'clock
was reached. Still no Wenuses. Another hour dragged wearily on, and the
craving for tea had become positively excruciating when five o'clock
rang out.
At that moment, the glass doors of the crockery department were flung
open, and out poured a procession of Wenuses smiling, said my mother,
with the utmost friendliness, dressed as A.B.C. girls, and bearing trays
studded with cups and saucers.
With the most seductive and ingratiating charm, a cup was handed to my
wife. What to do she did not for the moment know. "Could such a gift be
guileless?" she asked herself. "No." And yet the Wenuses looked
friendly. Finally her martial spirit prevailed and my wife repulsed the
cup, adjuring the rank and file to do the same. But in vain. Every
member of my wife's wing of that fainting army greedily grasped a cup.
Alas! what could they know of the deadly Tea-Tray of the Wenuses?
Nothing, absolutely nothing, such is the disgraceful neglect of science
in our schools and colleges. And so they drank and were consumed.
Meanwhile my mother, at the head of the south wing of the army, which
had been entirely overlooked by the Wenuses, stood watching the
destruction of my wife's host--a figure petrified with alarm and
astonishment. One by one she watched her sisters in arms succumb to the
awful Tea-Tray.
Then it was that this intrepid woman rose to her greatest height.
"Come!" she cried to her Amazons. "Come! They have no more tea left. Now
is the moment ripe."
With these spirited words, my mother and her troops proceeded to charge
down Queen's Road upon the unsuspecting Wenuses.
But they had reckoned without the enemy.
The tumult of the advancing host caught the ear of the Wonderful
Wisitors, and in an instant they had extracted glittering cases of their
crimson cigarettes from their pockets, and lighting them in the strange
fashion I have described elsewhere, they proceeded to puff the smoke
luxuriously into the faces of my mother and her comrades.
Alas! little did these gallant females know of the horrible properties
of the Red Weed. How could they, with our science-teaching in such a
wretched state?
The smoke grew in volume and density, spread and spread, and in a few
minutes the south wing of my wife's army was as supine as the north.
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