AGAMEMNON?  “Evidence from extraneous sources of connection between title of Anax andron and great Egyptian Empire.”  Aha!  I may yet have to play the Anax andron in Egypt as before.  Allegory—­I mean Anax andron on banks of Nile!  Good—­and not a Malapropism, whatever WOLSELEY may say.  “Title of Anax andron descendible” (good word, “descendible”) “from father to son, and accorded in the poems to personages altogether secondary, viz., EUMELOS and EUPHETES.”  Wonder what my EUMELOS—­HERBERT—­will say to that!

Enjoyed it much whilst MAX was “mouthing out” (as Mrs. BROWNING says) my eulogy of that man of “Phoenician stamp,” the “universal ODYSSEUS,” who expressed the many-sided, the all-accomplished man; the polutropos, the polumetis, the tlemon, the polutlas, the polumekanos, the poikilometis, the poluphron, the daiphron, the talasiphron. (What a peck of p’s!) In battle never foiled!  In council supreme!  His oratory like the snow-flakes of the winter storm.  Superbly representative Phoenician!  “But over and above this universality of ODYSSEUS in the arts of life, he bears the Phoenician stamp in what may be termed his craft.”  Aha!  The “Old Parliamentary Hand” of his period plainly.  Wonder if MAX thought of that!  Hellas and Phoenicia combined!  As a Statesman of classical culture, commercial instincts and craft, what a shining success ODYSSEUS might have been in these days!

  He went into the Cyclops’ cave
    To see what he could spy out;
  He slew his oxen, stole his sheep,
    And then he poked his eye out,

as the ribald doggerelist has it.  Sounds a little “predatory,” perhaps, as SALISBURY would say.  But quite capable of being “spiritualised” into a sound Liberal policy, directed against the purblind Poluphemos of Property and Privilege.

On the whole, I had a high old time among the Orientalists.  But when discussion ensued, I longed to throw off my disguise and rush, Achilles-like, into the fray.  But MAX might have thought that inconsistent with my “colossal humanity;” so, very unwillingly, I refrained.

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UP ALOFT.—­The most elevated title in the Peerage, and belonging to the upperest part of the Upper House, is “Lord MOUNTGARRET.”  There can be but one higher, and that will have to be created in the person of a future “Lord TOPOCHIMNEPOT.”  Though, perhaps, the title of “Lord COWLEY,” if it were altered into Lord CHIMNEPOT-COWL-Y, would be the highest of all.

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ANGLICE-FRENCHIE EXCLAMATION (on any of the recent many showery days when, after an interval of ten minutes, the next bucketful descended).—­“POUR une autre fois!”

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[Illustration:  NATURE’S SECRETS.

“HERE ARE SOME NEW LAID EGGS FOR YOU, GEORGIE!”