by one the little creatures creep from behind the blinds into the
streets. The brooding tenderness is vanished from the City's face. The
fretful noises of the day have come again. Silence, her lover of the
night, kisses her stone lips, and steals away. And you, gentle Reader,
return home, garlanded with the self-sufficiency of the early riser.

But it was of a certain week-day morning, in the Strand that I was
thinking. I was standing outside Gatti's Restaurant, where I had just
breakfasted, listening leisurely to an argument between an indignant
lady passenger, presumably of Irish extraction, and an omnibus
conductor.

"For what d'ye want thin to paint Putney on ye'r bus, if ye don't GO to
Putney?" said the lady.

"We DO go to Putney," said the conductor.

"Thin why did ye put me out here?"

"I didn't put you out, yer got out."

"Shure, didn't the gintleman in the corner tell me I was comin' further
away from Putney ivery minit?"

"Wal, and so yer was."

"Thin whoy didn't you tell me?"

"How was I to know yer wanted to go to Putney? Yer sings out Putney, and
I stops and in yer jumps."

"And for what d'ye think I called out Putney thin?"

"'Cause it's my name, or rayther the bus's name. This 'ere IS a Putney."

"How can it be a Putney whin it isn't goin' to Putney, ye gomerhawk?"

"Ain't you an Hirishwoman?" retorted the conductor. "Course yer are. But
yer aren't always goin' to Ireland. We're goin' to Putney in time, only
we're a-going to Liverpool Street fust. 'Igher up, Jim."

The bus moved on, and I was about cross the road, when a man, muttering
savagely to himself, walked into me. He would have swept past me had
I not, recognizing him, arrested him. It was my friend B-----, a busy
editor of magazines and journals. It was some seconds before he appeared
able to struggle out of his abstraction, and remember himself. "Halloo,"
he then said, "who would have thought of seeing YOU here?"

"To judge by the way you were walking," I replied, "one would imagine
the Strand the last place in which you expected to see any human being.
Do you ever walk into a short-tempered, muscular man?"

"Did I walk into you?" he asked surprised.

"Well, not right in," I answered, "I if we are to be literal. You walked
on to me; if I had not stopped you, I suppose you would have walked over
me."

"It is this confounded Christmas business," he explained. "It drives me
off my head."

"I have heard Christmas advanced as