Indeed, sometimes I feel that I have read their collected works, and Ommany’s Approximations, and many other books with which you would be only too glad to assume familiarity.  For in giving others the impression that I am on terms with these masterpieces, I have but handed on an impression which has gradually formed itself in my own mind.  So I take no advantage of them; and if it appears afterwards that we have been deceived together, I shall be at least as surprised and indignant about it as they.

A Question of Form

The latest invention on the market is the wasp gun.  In theory it is something like a letter clip; you pull the trigger and the upper and lower plates snap together with a suddenness which would surprise any insect in between.  The trouble will be to get him in the right place before firing.  But I can see that a lot of fun can be got out of a wasp drive.  We shall stand on the edge of the marmalade while the beaters go through it, and, given sufficient guns, there will not be many insects to escape.  A loader to clean the weapon at regular intervals will be a necessity.

Yet I am afraid that society will look down upon the wasp gun.  Anything useful and handy is always barred by the best people.  I can imagine a bounder being described as “the sort of person who uses a wasp gun instead of a teaspoon.”  As we all know, a hat-guard is the mark of a very low fellow.  I suppose the idea is that you and I, being so dashed rich, do not much mind if our straw hat does blow off into the Serpentine; it is only the poor wretch of a clerk, unable to afford a new one every day, who must take precautions against losing his first.  Yet how neat, how useful, is the hat-guard.  With what pride its inventor must have given birth to it.  Probably he expected a statue at the corner of Cromwell Road, fitting reward for a public benefactor.  He did not understand that, since his invention was useful, it was probably bad form.

Consider, again, the Richard or “dicky.”  Could there be anything neater or more dressy, anything more thoroughly useful?  Yet you and I scorn to wear one.  I remember a terrible situation in a story by Mr. W. S. Jackson.  The hero found himself in a foreign hotel without his luggage.  To that hotel came, with her father, the girl whom he adored silently.  An invitation was given him to dinner with them, and he had to borrow what clothes he could from friendly waiters.  These, alas! included a dicky.  Well, the dinner began well; our hero made an excellent impression; all was gaiety.  Suddenly a candle was overturned and the flame caught the heroine’s frock.  The hero knew what the emergency demanded.  He knew how heroes always whipped off their coats and wrapped them round burning heroines.  He jumped up like a bullet (or whatever jumps up quickest) and —­remembered.