king us for all our kindness and enclosing a present
to show his appreciation." She smiled. She seemed hugely pleased about
something. "He addresses it to me," she went on; "but, though I am grateful
for the kind thought, I do not myself eat chocolates."

She picked up the box, a comfortable-looking box ornamented with an orange
satin bow.

"I think these are more in your line than mine," she said, "and Renshaw was
in your ward. You have really the best right to them."

She handed me the box of chocolates. I gazed at my travelled Saint and he
gazed back. I could almost have sworn he winked.

Clutching him and his dragon, I departed and danced down the corridor into
the hall. There waited Bobbie, red-haired and khaki-clad, more like St.
George than the gallant knight himself.

"How do you do?" I greeted him. "Many happy returns, dear old thing!" As he
held out his hand I put something into it. "A box of chocolates," I
explained; "I bought them for your birthday!"

* * * * *

"Wanted, for Low Comedian, really Funny Sons."--_The Stage_.

As a change, we suppose, from the eternal mother-in-law.

* * * * *

[Illustration: _Inveterate Golfer_ (_stung by the leading article_). "I
SUPPOSE _I_ AM REALLY NON-ESSENTIAL. IT'S HARD TO REALISE THIS WITH ONE'S
HANDICAP JUST REDUCED TO SEVEN."]

* * * * *

THE REGIMENTAL MASCOT.

When his honour the Colonel took the owld rigiment to France, Herself came
home bringin' the rigimental mascot with her. A big white long-haired
billy-goat he was, the same.

"I'll not be afther lavin him at the daypo," says Herself; "'tis no place
for a domestic animal at all, the language them little drummer-boys uses,
the dear knows," says she.

So me bowld mascot he stops up at the Castle and makes free with the
flower-beds and the hall and the drawin'-room and the domestic maids the
way he'd be the Lord-Lieutenant o' the land, and not jist a plain human
Angory goat. A proud arrygent crature it is, be the powers! Steppin' about
as disdainy as a Dublin gerrl in Ballydehob, and if, mebbe, you'd address
him for to get off your flower-beds with the colour of anger in your mouth
he'd let a roar out of him like a Sligo piper with poteen taken, and fetch
you a skelp with his horns that would lay you out for dead.

And sorra the use is it of complainin' to Herself.

"Ah, Delaney, 'tis the marshal sperit