ad that paper,"
commanded the Lady Mayoress, "and offer any suggestion you can find as
to how I can keep up my position, or your position, whilst such a
statement as this" (tapping the opened paper) "remains uncontradicted."
Then the Lady Mayoress swept from the room.

Sir Simon groaned and closed his eyes before venturing to look at the
offending article. He instinctively felt he was about to receive a
shock without the necessary strength to bear it. Sir Simon gingerly
unclosed one eye and read, "Audacious attack by Mr. Learned Bore." Sir
Simon shivered and hastily closed the one eye he had opened. Then he
valiantly tried both eyes and read by way of a second and happy
headline, "The Lord Mayor revives Paganism in London." Sir Simon never
knew how he finished that article. It was a most scurrilous attack.

All the biting satire and vitriolic irony that Mr. Learned Bore had so
well at his command was here employed to compliment the Lord Mayor upon
being acclaimed a great Christian in the afternoon after opening his
New House for Children; whilst he was found at night like any Pagan of
old worshipping one of the lions in Trafalgar Square, around whose mane
he had hung a votive wreath of water-lilies, across whose unresponsive
neck the Lord Mayor had wound his arms in supplication, imploring it
that it might speak, and give a sign like the Oracle in Delphi.

Was the Lord Mayor of London the last of the great Pagans? asked the
writer, or had he merely gone back a few thousand years in imagination,
owing to the insidious suggestions of another Heathen Deity who had
doubtless presided over the Wine-press with an unstinted hand earlier
in the day during the banquet at the Guildhall? The writer dared to
express a hope that it was merely a form of Civic debauchery emanating
from the oft-replenished toasts of the Devil's cup, rather than a
classical intoxication which if persisted in might plunge the whole of
London once more into the perverted darkness of Pagan ages.

The Lord Mayor seized his hat and called for his carriage, and arrived
at the Writer's chambers overlooking Trafalgar Square, purple in the
face.

"Yes, I've read it, Dad," remarked the Writer as he observed Sir
Simon's signs of almost apoplectic agitation. "It's very bad form, and
what is worse it's very badly written."

"The pen is mightier than the sword," shouted Sir Simon, "and
unfortunately the sword is out of date nowadays, or I would challeng