the
minister at all. But in the dead man's pocket there was a return
ticket to Maidstone."

There was a short pause as Quin and his friends Barker and Lambert
went swinging on through the slushy grass of Kensington Gardens. Then
Auberon resumed.

"That story," he said reverently, "is the test of humour."

They walked on further and faster, wading through higher grass as they
began to climb a slope.

"I perceive," continued Auberon, "that you have passed the test, and
consider the anecdote excruciatingly funny; since you say nothing.
Only coarse humour is received with pot-house applause. The great
anecdote is received in silence, like a benediction. You felt pretty
benedicted, didn't you, Barker?"

"I saw the point," said Barker, somewhat loftily.

"Do you know," said Quin, with a sort of idiot gaiety, "I have lots of
stories as good as that. Listen to this one."

And he slightly cleared his throat.

"Dr. Polycarp was, as you all know, an unusually sallow bimetallist.
'There,' people of wide experience would say, 'There goes the
sallowest bimetallist in Cheshire.' Once this was said so that he
overheard it: it was said by an actuary, under a sunset of mauve and
grey. Polycarp turned upon him. 'Sallow!' he cried fiercely, 'sallow!
_Quis tulerit Gracchos de seditione querentes._' It was said that no
actuary ever made game of Dr. Polycarp again."

Barker nodded with a simple sagacity. Lambert only grunted.

"Here is another," continued the insatiable Quin. "In a hollow of the
grey-green hills of rainy Ireland, lived an old, old woman, whose
uncle was always Cambridge at the Boat Race. But in her grey-green
hollows, she knew nothing of this: she didn't know that there was a
Boat Race. Also she did not know that she had an uncle. She had heard
of nobody at all, except of George the First, of whom she had heard (I
know not why), and in whose historical memory she put her simple
trust. And by and by in God's good time, it was discovered that this
uncle of hers was not really her uncle, and they came and told her so.
She smiled through her tears, and said only, 'Virtue is its own
reward.'"

Again there was a silence, and then Lambert said--

"It seems a bit mysterious."

"Mysterious!" cried the other. "The true humour is mysterious. Do you
not realise the chief incident of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries?"

"And what's that?" asked Lambert, shortly.

"It is very simple," replied the other. "Hitherto