xt question was from Violet Orpington: "If you had never corrected
a naughty boy before, where would you correct him?"

"But, Violet," I said, "the answer to that could not be 'bee-hive.'"

"Oh," she said, "you said 'hive,' did you? I thought you said something
else."

I have never been able to guess what it was she thought I had said; and
she refused to tell me.

Another of our pencil-games was Missing Rhymes. One of us would write a
deccasyllabic couplet--we always called it a quatrain, as being a
better-class word--and the rhyme in the second line would not be
actually given but merely indicated.

For example, I myself wrote the following little sonnet:

"I have an adoration for
One person only, namely _je_."

To any reader who is familiar with the French language, this may seem
almost too easy, but I doubt if anybody who knew no language but modern
Greek would guess it. For the benefit of the uninitiated I may add that
the French word _je_ is pronounced "mwor," thus supplying the missing
rhyme.

Millie Wyandotte disgraced herself with the following lyric:

"After her dance, Salome, curtseying, fell,
And shocked the Baptist with her scream of 'Bother!'"

She had no sooner read it out than Mr. Bunting rose in his place and
said gravely:

"I can only speak definitely for myself, but it is my firm belief that
all present, with the exception of Miss Wyandotte, have too much
refinement to be able to guess correctly the missing rhyme in this
case." Loud and prolonged applause.

George Leghorn was particularly happy at these pencil games, and to him
is due this very clever combination of the lyrical and the acrostical:

"My first a man is, and my next a trap;
My whole's forbidden, lest it cause trouble."

The answer to the acrostic is "mantrap"; the missing rhyme is "mishap."
The entire solution was given in something under half an hour by Popsie
Bantam. She was a very bright girl, and afterwards married a man in the
Guards (L.N.W.R.).

Mr. Bunting, a rather strong party-politician, one night submitted this
little triolet:

"When the Great War new weapons bade us forge,
Whom did the nation trust? 'Twas thou, Asquith!"

The missing rhyme was guessed immediately, in two places, as the
auctioneers say.

However, by our next quinquennial meeting Nettie Minorca had thought out
the following rejoinder:

"When history's hand corrects the current myth,
Who