“The mote in the middle distance?” he asked.  “Did you ever, my dear, know me to see anything else?  I tell you it blocks out everything.  It’s a cathedral, it’s a herd of elephants, it’s the whole habitable globe.  Oh, it’s, believe me, of an obsessiveness!” But his sense of the one thing it didn’t block out from his purview enabled him to launch at Eva a speculation as to just how far Santa Claus had, for the particular occasion, gone.  The gauge, for both of them, of this seasonable distance seemed almost blatantly suspended in the silhouettes of the two stockings.  Over and above the basis of (presumably) sweetmeats in the toes and heels, certain extrusions stood for a very plenary fulfilment of desire.  And, since Eva had set her heart on a doll of ample proportions and practicable eyelids—­had asked that most admirable of her sex, their mother, for it with not less directness than he himself had put into his demand for a sword and helmet—­her coyness now struck Keith as lying near to, at indeed a hardly measurable distance from, the border-line of his patience.  If she didn’t want the doll, why the deuce had she made such a point of getting it?  He was perhaps on the verge of putting this question to her, when, waving her hand to include both stockings, she said “Of course, my dear, you do see.  There they are, and you know I know you know we wouldn’t, either of us, dip a finger into them.”  With a vibrancy of tone that seemed to bring her voice quite close to him, “One doesn’t,” she added, “violate the shrine—­pick the pearl from the shell!”

Even had the answering question “Doesn’t one just?” which for an instant hovered on the tip of his tongue, been uttered, it could not have obscured for Keith the change which her magnificence had wrought in him.  Something, perhaps, of the bigotry of the convert was already discernible in the way that, averting his eyes, he said “One doesn’t even peer.”  As to whether, in the years that have elapsed since he said this either of our friends (now adult) has, in fact, “peered,” is a question which, whenever I call at the house, I am tempted to put to one or other of them.  But any regret I may feel in my invariable failure to “come up to the scratch” of yielding to this temptation is balanced, for me, by my impression—­my sometimes all but throned and anointed certainty—­that the answer, if vouchsafed, would be in the negative.

P.C., X, 36

By

R*D**RD K*PL*NG

Then it’s collar ’im tight,
In the name o’ the Lawd! 
’Ustle ’im, shake ’im till ’e’s sick! 
Wot, ’e would, would ’e?  Well,
Then yer’ve got ter give ’im ’Ell,
An’ it’s trunch, trunch, truncheon does the trick

POLICE STATION DITTIES.

I had spent Christmas Eve at the Club, listening to a grand pow-wow between certain of the choicer sons of Adam.  Then Slushby had cut in.  Slushby is one who writes to newspapers and is theirs obediently “HUMANITARIAN.”  When Slushby cuts in, men remember they have to be up early next morning.