as and gingers. "It's inside one of them," she said.

For the moment I failed to grasp her meaning. She explained. "I've
made six dozen. The knife was all right when I started; a little bent,
nothing more. It was when I was mixing the last that I noticed the tip
was missing."

It was a difficult position. There was no time to submit the cakes to
the X-rays; the advance party was streaming through the gate.

"Dear fellows! I wonder which one it will be," said Emily, and clung
round my neck.

I put her on one side. "I'll manage it; leave it to me," I said, and
went forward and welcomed our guests. My mind was working clearly
and rapidly, as it always does in a crisis. When I had got them
seated round the tea-table, "My dear friends," I said, "this isn't
a Christmas party, but my wife couldn't help indulging in a little
Christmas fun. She's just whispered to me that she's put a surprise
in one of the cakes. I know her. It won't be an ordinary sort of
surprise. I should advise you all to keep a sharp look-out. There's a
pound" (it was worth a pound to save a hero's throat from being cut)
"for the man who finds anything in his cake which hasn't any business
to be there."

Within five minutes two pebbles, a tin-tack, a chunk of wood and a
black-beetle were on the tablecloth....

"Do you know that flutter's cost me five pounds, and there wasn't a
sign of your infernal knife after all?" I said to Emily when they'd
gone.

"I've just found it under the kitchen table," said Emily. "I _am_
thankful."

* * * * *

"This company's year ended on the 40th June, and a good
distribution is looked for by the market."--_Journal of
Commerce_.

With such help from the calendar any company should do well.

* * * * *

THE SIGNAL SECTION.

You know how the great hunter who sleeps with his gun at his pillow
is awake in an instant, with all his faculties alert, when the sacred
spider breaks a twig in the jungle? You remember how the handsome
highwayman, at the first far clatter of hoofs on the great North Road,
is up and out on the scullery roof of the inn before you have turned
the page, and is deep in Lonely Copse (wearing the serving-wench's
stomacher) before his first fat pursuer has said, "Open in the name of
the Law," below his window? Well, like Jimmy's bloodhound in _Punch_,
I am very good at that.

But it is a telephone-bell that does it. You go