were each taken in tow and
personally conducted by a trio of Divine Guides, respectively named
Love, Mercy and Wisdom, who came forward whenever nothing of consequence
was transpiring, and sang with the melodiousness of Paradisiacal fowls.

As for the representation of the Hindu Paradise, I shall confess to
some disappointment, seeing that it was exclusively reserved to military
masculines--the more highly educated civilian class of Baboos being left
out of the cold altogether! Nor am I in love with a future state in
which there is so much dancing up and down lofty flights of stairs with
terpsichorean energy, and manoeuvring in companies and circles with
members of the softer sex. As a philosophical conception of disembodied
existence, it is undeniably deficient in repose, though perhaps good
enough for ordinary fighting chaps!

I spent a rapturous and ripping evening, however, greatly owing to the
condescension of Miss WEE-WEE, who exhibited such entertainment at my
comments that I left under the confident persuasion that I was
infallibly to be the favoured swain.

On returning to Hereford Road, I found a last letter from JESSIMINA,
beseeching me, for the sake of "Old Langsyne," to meet her on the
following evening at Westbourne Park Station, and mentioning that
certain events had occurred to change her views, and she was now only
desirous for an amicable arrangement.

Accordingly, perceiving that I had no longer any reason to dread such an
encounter, and not wishing her to peak and pine through my unkindness, I
wrote at once accepting the _rendezvous_.

When I duly turned up, lo and behold! I found she was escorted, not
only by her eagle-eyed mother (JESSIMINA herself inherits, in _Hamlet's_
immortal phraseology, "an eye like Ma's, to threaten or command"), but
also by a juvenile individual with a black neck-tie and Hebrew profile,
whom she formerly introduced to me as Mr SOLOMONS.

Though a little hurt by this proof of the rapidity of feminine
fickleness, I began to congratulate her effusively on having obtained
such an excellent substitute for my worthless self, and to wish the
happy couple all earthly felicities, when she explained that he was not
a _fiance_, but merely a sort of friend, and Mrs MANKLETOW severely
added that they had come to know whether I still declined to fulfil my
legal contract.

Naturally I made the answer that I had recently offered to fulfil same
to best ability, but that, my offer h