he place, including the lift-boy and the Belgian
waiter, seemed to hear that remark.

"Arrested?" whispered Mother in reverberating tone-waves.

"Yes. How was I to know that I had pitched my tent on private property
and was unwittingly trespassing? They would have prosecuted me if I
hadn't----"

"You had better come up to my room and explain there," interposed
Mother; and we followed her, a broken woman, to the lift. People fell
aside to make a passage for us.

Mother held up until she got to her own room. Then she sat down and
cried. "Why did you disgrace us like this?" she asked at last of Ernest.
"Was it necessary for you to come _here_?"

"I had to," said Ernest apologetically. "You see I hadn't any money."

Mother looked up quickly. "But what of the extra ten pounds I insisted
on your taking with you in case of emergency?"

Ernest appeared slightly shame-faced. "Well, when those fatuous asses
hauled me up for trespassing they left me in the charge of a gamekeeper
while they 'phoned for the police. I induced the chap to let me go, and
I had to square him with a tenner."

There was a long pause. Mother's mind seemed to be working at some
abstruse calculation. Then she dried her eyes and looked up with the
triumphant smile of the woman who gets the last word and wins her point.

"And so, Ernest," she said, "it _did_ cost you five guineas a week to
'breathe the pure air of Heaven' after all."

* * * * *

Illustration: "SORRY TO HEAR YOUR HUSBAND IS LAID UP AGAIN, MRS.
GRIGGS."

"YES. THE TROUBLE IS HE BE AN OLD MAN, AND HE _WILL_ TURN A DEAF EAR TO
THE WRITIN' ON THE WALL."

* * * * *

PRAWLING'S THEORY.

(_By a Student of Jargon._)

By the courtesy of Professor Prawling, F. R. S., who has supplied us
with the MS. of his recent lecture before the Psycho-Economical Society,
we are in a position to give our readers a full account of that masterly
and epoch-making address, of which, strange to say, no adequate notice
has so far appeared in any newspaper.

Professor Prawling's credentials, we may premise, are of a nature to
inspire the utmost confidence. His father, Theodore Prawling, was the
inventor of the speedle, that remarkable implement, fully described by
_Punch_ in the early seventies, which rendered possible the
emulsification of all gelatinoid substances and revolutionised the
marmalade industry. He is duly commemorated by the fin