't remember till afterwards that he had given
her two fat volumes on the subject, with his portrait and autograph as a
frontispiece and an appendix on the habits of the Arctic mussel.

It was in the evening that we cast aside the cares and distractions of
the day and really lived. Cards were thought to be too frivolous and
empty a way of passing the time, so most of them played what they called
a book game. You went out into the hall--to get an inspiration, I
suppose--then you came in again with a muffler tied round your neck and
looked silly, and the others were supposed to guess that you were "Wee
MacGreegor." I held out against the inanity as long as I decently could,
but at last, in a lapse of good-nature, I consented to masquerade as a
book, only I warned them that it would take some time to carry out. They
waited for the best part of forty minutes, while I went and played
wineglass skittles with the page-boy in the pantry; you play it with a
champagne cork, you know, and the one who knocks down the most glasses
without breaking them wins. I won, with four unbroken out of seven; I
think William suffered from over-anxiousness. They were rather mad in
the drawing-room at my not having come back, and they weren't a bit
pacified when I told them afterwards that I was "At the end of the
passage."

"I never did like Kipling," was Mrs. Babwold's comment, when the
situation dawned upon her. "I couldn't see anything clever in
_Earthworms out of Tuscany_--or is that by Darwin?"

Of course these games are very educational, but, personally, I prefer
bridge.

On Christmas evening we were supposed to be specially festive in the Old
English fashion. The hall was horribly draughty, but it seemed to be the
proper place to revel in, and it was decorated with Japanese fans and
Chinese lanterns, which gave it a very Old English effect. A young lady
with a confidential voice favoured us with a long recitation about a
little girl who died or did something equally hackneyed, and then the
Major gave us a graphic account of a struggle he had with a wounded bear.
I privately wished that the bears would win sometimes on these occasions;
at least they wouldn't go vapouring about it afterwards. Before we had
time to recover our spirits, we were indulged with some thought-reading
by a young man whom one knew instinctively had a good mother and an
indifferent tailor--the sort of young man who talks unflaggingly through
the thickest