ly betrayed me.)
"Nobody does, at least no one I have ever met. Three years ago, when I
was living in Hammersmith, we caught two burglars with it. They broke
open the sideboard, and swallowed five bottlefuls between them. A
policeman found them afterwards, sitting on a doorstep a hundred yards
off, the 'swag' beside them in a carpet bag. They were too ill to offer
any resistance, and went to the station like lambs, he promising to send
the doctor to them the moment they were safe in the cells. Ever since
then I have left out a decanterful upon the table every night.

"Well, I like that claret, and it does me good. I come in sometimes dead
beat. I drink a couple of glasses, and I'm a new man. I took to it in
the first instance for the same reason that I took to the cigars--it was
cheap. I have it sent over direct from Geneva, and it costs me six
shillings a dozen. How they do it I don't know. I don't want to know.
As you may remember, it's fairly heady and there's body in it.

"I knew one man," he continued, "who had a regular Mrs. Caudle of a wife.
All day long she talked to him, or at him, or of him, and at night he
fell asleep to the rising and falling rhythm of what she thought about
him. At last she died, and his friends congratulated him, telling him
that now he would enjoy peace. But it was the peace of the desert, and
the man did not enjoy it. For two-and-twenty years her voice had filled
the house, penetrated through the conservatory, and floated in faint
shrilly waves of sound round the garden, and out into the road beyond.
The silence now pervading everywhere frightened and disturbed him. The
place was no longer home to him. He missed the breezy morning insult,
the long winter evening's reproaches beside the flickering fire. At
night he could not sleep. For hours he would lie tossing restlessly, his
ears aching for the accustomed soothing flow of invective.

"'Ah!' he would cry bitterly to himself, 'it is the old story, we never
know the value of a thing until we have lost it.'

"He grew ill. The doctors dosed him with sleeping draughts in vain. At
last they told him bluntly that his life depended upon his finding
another wife, able and willing to nag him to sleep.

"There were plenty of wives of the type he wanted in the neighbourhood,
but the unmarried women were, of necessity, inexperienced, and his health
was such that he could not afford the time to train them.

"Fortunately, just