waistcoats.  But the particular egg of which I speak is one of the beautiful white things—­like snow, or a breaking wave, or teeth.  So certain am I, however, that neither it nor the little brown one will ever come my way, while there is a woman or a child or a guest to prevent it, that when I am asked how I like the eggs to be done I make it a point to say “poached” or “fried.”  It gives me at least a chance of getting one of the sort of eggs I like by accident.  As for poached eggs, I agree.  There are nine ways of poaching eggs, and each of them is worse than the other.  Still, there is one good thing about poached eggs:  one is never disappointed.  One accepts a poached egg like fate.  There is no sitting on tenterhooks, watching and waiting and wondering, as there is in regard to boiled eggs.  I admit that most of the difficulties associated with boiled eggs could be got over by the use of egg-cosies—­appurtenances of the breakfast table that stirred me to the very depths of delight when I first set eyes on them as a child.  It was at a mothers’ meeting, where I was the only male present.  Thousands of women sat round me, sewing and knitting things for a church bazaar.  Much might be written about egg-cosies.  Much might be said for and much against.  They would be effective, however only if it were regarded as a point of honour not to look under the cosy before choosing the egg.  And the sense of honour, they say, is a purely masculine attribute.  Children never had it, and women have lost it.  I do not know a single woman whom I would trust not to look under an egg cosy—­not, at least, unless she were forbidden eggs by the doctor.  In that case, any egg would seem delicious, and she would seize the nearest, irrespective of class or colour.

This may not explain the connection between eggs and Easter.  But then neither does The Encyclopædia Britannica.  I have looked up both the article on eggs and the article on Easter, and in neither of them can I find anything more relevant than such remarks as that “the eggs of the lizard are always white or yellowish, and generally soft-shelled; but the geckos and the green lizards lay hard-shelled eggs” or “Gregory of Tours relates that in 577 there was a doubt about Easter.”  In order to learn something about Easter eggs one has to turn to some such work as The Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, which tells us that “the practice of presenting eggs to our friends at Easter is Magian or Persian, and bears allusion to the mundane egg, for which Ormuzd and Ahriman were to contend till the consummation of all things.”  The advantage of reading Tit-Bits is that one gets to know hundreds of things like that.  The advantage of not reading Tit-Bits is that one is so ignorant of them that a piece of information of this sort is as fresh and unexpected as the morning’s news every Easter Monday.  Next Easter, I feel sure, I shall look it up again.  I shall have forgotten all about the mundane egg, even if Ormuzd and Ahriman have not.  I shall be thinking more about my breakfast egg.  What a piece of work is a man!  And yet many profound things might be said about eggs, mundane or otherwise.  I wish I could have thought of them.