of four squares.  MacBryde had four Pawns, two Rooks, a Queen, a draught, and a small mantel ornament arranged in a rough semicircle athwart the board.  I have no doubt chess exquisites will sneer at this position, but in my opinion it is one of the cheerfulest I have ever seen.  I remember I admired it very much at the time, in spite of a slight headache, and it is still the only game of chess that I recall with undiluted pleasure.  And yet I have played many games.

THE COAL-SCUTTLE

A STUDY IN DOMESTIC AESTHETICS

Euphemia, who loves to have home dainty and delightful, would have no coals if she could dispense with them, much less a coal-scuttle.  Indeed, it would seem she would have no fireplace at all, if she had her will.  All the summer she is happy, and the fireplace is anything but the place for a fire; the fender has vanished, the fireirons are gone, it is draped and decorated and disguised.  So would dear Euphemia drape and disguise the whole iron framework of the world, with that decorative and decent mind of hers, had she but the scope.  There are exotic ferns there, spreading their fanlike fronds, and majolica glows and gleams; and fabrics, of which Morris is the actual or spiritual begetter, delight the eye.  In summer-time our fireplace is indeed a thing of beauty, but, alas for the solar system! it is not a joy for ever.  The sun at last recedes beyond the equinoxes, and the black bogey who has slept awakens again.  Euphemia restores the fender kerb and the brazen dogs and the fireirons that will clatter; and then all the winter, whenever she sits before the fire, her trouble is with her.  Even when the red glow of the fire lights up her features most becomingly, and flattery is in her ear, every now and then a sidelong glance at her ugly foe shows that the thought of it is in her mind, and that the crumpled roseleaf, if such a phrase may be used for a coal-scuttle, insists on being felt.  And she has even been discovered alone, sitting elbows on knees, and chin on her small clenched fist, frowning at it, puzzling how to circumvent the one enemy of her peace.

“It” is what Euphemia always calls this utensil, when she can bring herself to give the indescribable an imperfect vent in speech.  But commonly the feeling is too deep for words.  Her war with this foeman in her household, this coarse rebel in her realm of soft prettiness, is one of those silent ones, those grim struggles without outcry or threat or appeal for quarter that can never end in any compromise, never find a rest in any truce, except the utter defeat of her antagonist.  And how she has tried—­the happy thoughts, the faint hopes, the new departures and outflanking movements!  And even to-day there the thing defies her—­a coal-box, with a broad smile that shows its black teeth, thick and squat, filling a snug corner and swaggering in unmanly triumph over the outrage upon her delicacy that it commits.