em all one of these
days, what could be achieved by a unit of the despised majority....

"I should like to see him at night-work," she said afterwards, when, very
late, her Bingo appeared in the shadow of the conjugal mosquito-curtains.

"You wouldn't," was her martial lord's reply.

"Wouldn't what?" asked Lady Hannah, sitting up in tropical sleeping
attire.

Bingo, applying her cold cream to a sun-cracked nose, replied to her
reflection in the looking-glass:

"You wouldn't see him. Like the flea in the American story, when you've
got your finger on him is the time he isn't there."

"But he is there for you?"

Bingo shook his head, holding the candle near the glass and regarding his
leading feature with interest.

"Not if he don't choose to be. By the living Tinker! if I go on brownin'
and chippin' at this rate, I shall do for the Etruscan Antiquity Room at
the British Museum. Piff, what a smell of burning! It's the hair-thing
hangin' on the lookin'-glass."

Male Society began to practise the shedding of its final g's, you will
remember, about the time that Female Society took to wearing
transformation coiffures. Lady Hannah, her active little figure rustling
in the thinnest of silk drapery, jumped nimbly out of bed, and rushed to
save her property.

"Idiot!" she shrieked.

"Frightfully sorry! But you're lumps prettier without," said Bingo.

"Don't pile insult on injury."

"Couldn't flatter for nuts!"

"I'll forgive you if you'll tell me how _he_ manages--to attain
invisibility?"

Bingo struck an attitude and began to declaim:

"As the sable shades of Night were broodin' over the beleaguered town of
Gueldersdorp, the manly form of a mysterious bearded stranger in grey
reach-me-downs and a felt slouch might have been observed directin' its
steps from one to the other of the various outlyin' pickets posted on the
veld ..."

"Once for all, I decline to believe such theatrical rubbish! A beard,
indeed! Why not a paper nose and a Pierrot's cap?"

"Why not?" acquiesced placid Bingo, getting into bed. But the eye
concealed by the pillow winked; for he had told her the absolute truth;
and woman-like, that was just what she wouldn't swallow, as he said to
Beauvayse next morning.

XXII

"The Town Guard," according to W. Keyse, Esquire, who kept a Betts'
Journal, one shilling net, including Rail and Ocean Accident Insurance,
was "a kind of amachoor copper, swore in to look after the dorp, stand