he man kneeled before her rubbing the small,
milk-white feet with strong and tender touches. Presently, as they
were thus engaged, they heard the sprite faintly whispering, while one
of his eyelids flickered:

"I think--if each of you--would kiss me--on opposite cheeks--at the
same moment--those kind of movements would revive me."

[Illustration: The Unruly Sprite.]

The two friends looked at each other, and the man spoke first.

"He talks ungrammatically, and I think he is an incorrigible little
savage, but I love him. Shall we try his idea?"

"If you love him," said the lady, "I am willing to try, provided you
shut your eyes."

So they both shut their eyes and tried.

But just at that moment the unruly sprite slipped down, and put his
hands behind their heads, and the two mouths that sought his cheeks
met lip to lip in a kiss so warm, so long, so sweet that everything
else was forgotten.

Now you can easily see that as the persons who had this strange
experience were the ones who told me the tale, their forgetfulness at
this point leaves it of necessity half-told. But I know from other
sources that the man who was also a writer went on making books, and
the lady always told him truly whether they were good, or bad, or
merely popular. But what the unruly sprite is doing now nobody knows.

[Illustration]

A CHANGE OF AIR

There were three neighbours who lived side by side in a certain
village. They were bound together by the contiguousness of their back
yards and front porches, and by a community of interest in taxes and
water-rates and the high cost of living. They were separated by their
religious opinions; for one of them was a Mystic, and the second was a
Sceptic, and the other was a suppressed Dyspeptic who called himself
an Asthmatic.

These differences were very dear to them, and laid the foundations of
a lasting friendship in a nervous habit of interminable argument on
all possible subjects. Their wives did not share in these
disputations because they were resolved to be neighbourly, and they
could not conceive a difference of opinion without a personal
application. So they called one another Clara and Caroline and
Katharine, and kissed audibly whenever they met, but they were careful
to confine their conversation to topics upon which they had only one
mind, such as the ingratitude of domestic servants.

The husbands, however, as often as they could get together without the
mollifying i