When I left, just before my departure for the six-miles-distant station, I called for a looking-glass.  They brought me a piece of the one I had cast away.  It was very small, but it served my purpose.  I gazed and heaved a sigh of rapturous content; a sigh that came from my very heart.  My beard was short and thick, its colour a deep glorious brown, with golden lights here and there where the sunbeams danced in some lighter cluster of its curling strands.  A beard that a king might wear.

I have never shaved again.  Every morning now, while untold millions of my suffering fellows are groaning beneath their razors, I steal an extra fifteen minutes from the day and lie and laugh inside my beard.

“And what of Emily?” you ask.

Almost immediately after my return she left us.  She gave no reason.  She was not unhappy, she said.  She wished to make a change, that was all.  To this day my wife cannot account for her departure.  But I know why she went.  Emily was a patriot with a purpose.  A month after she parted from us I received a letter from her:—­

“Dear Sir,—­May I ask you to take into consideration the fact that by having ceased to shave you will in future be effecting a slight economy in your daily expenditure?  Might I also suggest to you that during the remainder of the War you should make a voluntary contribution to the national exchequer of every shilling saved under this head?  The total sum will not be large, but everything counts.  Yours is, if I may be allowed to say so, the finest beard I have been instrumental in producing during my two and a half years’ experience in domestic service.  I am now hard at work on my sixth case, which is approaching its crisis.

Apologising for any temporary inconvenience I may have caused you, I am,

Yours faithfully, EMILY JOHNSON,

  Foundress and President of the
  Housemaids’ Society for the
  Promotion of Patriotic Beards.”

I never showed the letter to my wife, but I have acted on Emily’s suggestion.  I often think of her still, her whole soul afire with her patriotic mission, flitting, the very flower of housemaids, from home to home, lingering but a little while in each, in each content for that little while to be loathed and stormed at by an exasperated shaver, whom she transforms into a happy bearded contributor to her fund.

* * * * *

=Another Impending Apology.=

“This terrible fire roused hundreds of people from their beds, and a great crowd gathered in the adjoining streets; but Sub-divisional Inspector Stock and Inspector Ping were on the spot within a few months after receiving the call.”—­Westminster and Pimlico News.

* * * * *

[Illustration:  Cowman (to new recruit, Women’s Land Army).  “YOU GET BEHIND THAT THERE WATER-BUTT.  MEBBE COWS WON’T COME IN IF THEY SEE YOU IN THAT THERE RIG.”]