occasion to engage a new
housekeeper for their palace in Park Lane. The outgoing official wrote
to her incoming successor a detailed account of the house and its
inmates. The butler was a very pleasant man. The _chef_ was inclined to
tipple. The lady's-maid gave herself airs; and the head housemaid was a
very well principled young woman--and so on and so forth. After the
signature, huddled away in a casual postscript, came the damning
sentence, "As for Mr. and Mrs. M----, they behave as well as they know
how." Was it by inadvertence, or from a desire to let people know their
proper place, that the recipient of this letter allowed its contents to
find their way to the children of the family?

As incidentally indicated above, a free recourse to alcoholic stimulus
used to be, in less temperate days, closely associated with the culinary
art; and one of the best cooks I ever knew was urged by her mistress to
attend a great meeting for the propagation of the Blue Ribbon, to be
held not a hundred miles from Southampton, and addressed by a famous
preacher of total abstinence. The meeting was enthusiastic, and the Blue
Ribbon was freely distributed. Next morning the lady anxiously asked her
cook what effect the oratory had produced on her, and she replied, with
the evident sense of narrow escape from imminent danger, "Well, my lady,
if Mr. ---- had gone on for five minutes more, I believe I should have
taken the Ribbon too; but, thank goodness! he stopped in time."

So far, I find, I have chiefly dealt with the Art of Putting Things as
practised by the "urbane" or town-bred classes. Let me give a few
instances of "pagan" or countrified use. A village blacksmith was
describing to me with unaffected pathos the sudden death of his very
aged father; "and," he added, "the worst part of it was that I had to go
and break it to my poor old mother." Genuinely entering into my friend's
grief, I said, "Yes; that must have been terrible. How did you break
it?" "Well, I went into her cottage and I said. 'Dad's dead.' She said,
'What?' and I said, 'Dad's dead, and you may as well know it first as
last.'" Breaking it! Truly a curious instance of the rural Art of
Putting Things.

A labourer in Buckinghamshire, being asked how the rector of the village
was, replied, "Well, he's getting wonderful old; but they do tell me
that his understanding's no worse than it always was"--a pagan synonym
for the hackneyed phrase that one is in full possessio