rong for us. Why is it that all these
strikes occur just at this time of year? The old hibernating instinct
again, perhaps. The workman has a subconscious yearning to scratch
together a nice soft heap of manila envelopes and lie down on that couch
for a six months' ear-pounding. There are all sorts of excuses that one
can make to one's self for waving farewell to toil. Only last Sunday we
saw this ad in a paper:

HEIRS WANTED. The war is over and has made many new heirs. You
may be one of them. Investigate. Many now living in poverty are
rich, but don't know it.

Now what could be simpler (we said to ourself as we stood contemplating
those doughnuts) than to forsake our jolly old typewriter and spend a
few months in "investigating" whether any one had made us his heir? It
might be. Odd things have happened. Down in Washington Square, for
instance (we thought), are a number of sun-warmed benches, very
reposeful to the sedentary parts, on which we might recline and think
over the possibility of our being rich unawares. We hastened thither,
but apparently many had had the same idea. There was not a bench vacant.
The same was true in Independence Square and in Franklin Square. We will
never make a good loafer. There is too much competition.

So we came back, sadly, to our rolltop and fell to musing. We picked up
a magazine and found some pictures showing how Mary Pickford washes her
hair. "If I am sun-drying my hair," said Mary (under a photo showing her
reclining in a lovely garden doing just that), "I usually have the
opportunity to read a scenario or do some other duty which requires
concentration." And it occurred to us that if a strain like that is put
upon a weak woman we surely ought to be able to go on moiling for a
while, Indian summer or not. And then we found some pictures by our
favourite artist, Coles Phillips, with that lovely shimmer around the
ankles, and we resolved to be strong and brave and have pointed
finger-nails. But still, in the back of our mind, the debilitating
influence of fall fever was at work. We said to ourself, without the
slightest thought of printing it (for it seemed to put us in a false
light), that the one triumphant and unanswerable epigram of mankind, the
grandest and most resolute utterance in the face of implacable fate, is
the snore.

TWO DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS

Will the hand-organ man please call? Our wife has dug up our old
overcoat and insists on givi