I hoped she would pardon me for changing the subject abruptly and asking an apparently ridiculous question, but would she call a man mad if she found him whispering secrets into a bee-hive?

My landlady promptly replied that, on the contrary, she would think him extremely sensible; for that, unless bees were told of all that was happening in the household to which they belonged, they might consider themselves neglected, and leave the place in wrath.  She asserted this to be a notorious fact.

“I have one more question,” I said.  “Suppose that you found in your garden a lock of hair—­a lock such as this, for instance—­what would you do with it?”

She looked at it, and caught her breath sharply.

“I’m no meddler,” she said at last; “I should burn it.”

“Why?”

“Because if ’twas left about, the birds might use it for their nests, and weave it in so tight that the owner couldn’t rise on Judgment day”

So I burnt the lock of hair in her presence; because I wanted its owner to rise on Judgment day and state a case which, after all, was no affair of mine.

THE MAGIC SHADOW.

Once upon a time there was born a man-child with a magic shadow.

His case was so rare that a number of doctors have been disputing over it ever since and picking his parents’ histories and genealogies to bits, to find the cause.  Their inquiries do not help us much.  The father drove a cab; the mother was a charwoman and came of a consumptive family.  But these facts will not quite account for a magic shadow.  The birth took place on the night of a new moon, down a narrow alley into which neither moon nor sun ever penetrated beyond the third-storey windows—­and that is why the parents were so long in discovering their child’s miraculous gift.  The hospital-student who attended merely remarked that the babe was small and sickly, and advised the mother to drink sound port-wine while nursing him,—­which she could not afford.

Nevertheless, the boy struggled somehow through five years of life, and was put into smallclothes.  Two weeks after this promotion his mother started off to scrub out a big house in the fashionable quarter, and took him with her:  for the house possessed a wide garden, laid with turf and lined with espaliers, sunflowers, and hollyhocks, and as the month was August, and the family away in Scotland, there seemed no harm in letting the child run about in this paradise while she worked.  A flight of steps descended from the drawing-room to the garden, and as she knelt on her mat in the cool room it was easy to keep an eye on him.  Now and then she gazed out into the sunshine and called; and the boy stopped running about and nodded back, or shouted the report of some fresh discovery.

By-and-by a sulphur butterfly excited him so that he must run up the broad stone steps with the news.  The woman laughed, looking at his flushed face, then down at his shoe-strings, which were untied:  and then she jumped up, crying out sharply—­“Stand still, child—­stand still a moment!”