o kiss him.

_The Guard._ I see what is your complaint. You have been imbibing the
drop too much and will hear of this from the Company. I must trouble
you, Mam, for your correct name and address.

_Myself_ (_after he had obtained this and was departing_). Mister Guard,
I do most earnestly entreat you not to abandon me to the tender mercies
of this feminine. I am not a proficient in physical courage, and have no
desire to test the correctness of Poet POPE'S assertion, that Hell does
not possess the fury of a scorned woman. I request to be conducted into
a better-populated compartment.

_The Guard_ (_with complimentary jocosity_). Ah, such young good-looking
chaps as you ought to go about in a veil. Come with me, and I'll put you
into a smoker-carriage. You won't be run after there!

So the incident was closed, and I did greatly compliment myself upon the
sagacity and coolness of head with which I extricated myself from my
pretty kettle of fish. For to have denounced myself as the real alarmist
would have rendered the affair more, rather than less, discreditable to
my feminine companion, and I should have been arraigned before the
solemn bar of a police-court magistrate, who might even have made a Star
Chamber matter of the incident.

All is well that is well over, but when you have been once bitten, you
become doubly bashful. Consequently, this humble self will take care
that he does not on any subsequent occasion travel alone in a railway
compartment with a female woman.

XII

_Mr Jabberjee is taken by surprise._

Diligent perusers of my lucubrations to _Punch_ will remember that I
have devoted sundry jots and tittles to the subject of Miss JESSIMINA
MANKLETOW, and already may have concluded that I was long since up to
the hilt in the tender passion. In this deduction, however, they would
have manufactured a stentorian cry from an extreme paucity of wool; the
actual fact being that, although percipient of the well-proportionate
symmetry of her person and the ladylike liveliness of her deportment, I
did never regard her except with eyes of strictly platonic philandering
and calf love.

It is true that, at certain seasons, the ostentatious favours she would
squander upon other young masculine boarders in my presence did reduce
me to the doleful dump of despair, so that even the birds and beasts of
forest shed tears at my misery, and frequently at meal-times I have
sought to move her to compassion by ne