ld he or she tell us? Or would the fashionable novelist reply as I
once overheard a harassed mother retort upon one of her inquiring
children. Most of the afternoon she had been rushing out into the
garden, where games were in progress, to tell the children what they must
not do:--"Tommy, you know you must not do that. Haven't you got any
sense at all?" "Johnny, you wicked boy, how dare you do that; how many
more times do you want me to tell you?" "Jane, if you do that again you
will go straight to bed, my girl!" and so on.

At length the door was opened from without, and a little face peeped in:
"Mother!"

"Now, what is it? can't I ever get a moment's peace?"

"Mother, please would you mind telling us something we might do?"

The lady almost fell back on the floor in her astonishment. The idea had
never occurred to her.

"What may you do! Don't ask me. I am tired enough of telling you what
not to do."

Things a Gentleman should never do.

I remember when a young man, wishful to conform to the rules of good
society, I bought a book of etiquette for gentlemen. Its fault was just
this. It told me through many pages what not to do. Beyond that it
seemed to have no idea. I made a list of things it said a gentleman
should _never_ do: it was a lengthy list.

Determined to do the job completely while I was about it, I bought other
books of etiquette and added on their list of "Nevers." What one book
left out another supplied. There did not seem much left for a gentleman
to do.

I concluded by the time I had come to the end of my books, that to be a
true gentleman my safest course would be to stop in bed for the rest of
my life. By this means only could I hope to avoid every possible _faux
pas_, every solecism. I should have lived and died a gentleman. I could
have had it engraved upon my tombstone:

"He never in his life committed a single act unbecoming to a gentleman."

To be a gentleman is not so easy, perhaps, as a fashionable novelist
imagines. One is forced to the conclusion that it is not a question
entirely for the outfitter. My attention was attracted once by a notice
in the window of a West-End emporium, "Gentlemen supplied."

It is to such like Universal Providers that the fashionable novelist goes
for his gentleman. The gentleman is supplied to him complete in every
detail. If the reader be not satisfied, that is the reader's fault. He
is one of those tiresome, discontented