Rampant her mood. The eye of _Slew_
Is one in number; she alone,
Blinded by passion, makes it two.

She's out for eyes, and cannot tarry
To ponder arithmetic laws.
And what is the result? Miss _Carrie_
Claws _Slew_; _Slew_ slews; Miss _Carrie's_ claws

Miscarry, and the eye is his.
Rough on poor _Caroline_, no doubt;
But there--the moral of it is,
First count your eye, then have it out.

* * * * *

[Illustration: ACT I. _"Guvnor" (dismissing office-boy)_. "YOU'VE
NEGLECTED YOUR WORK," ETC. ETC. "THAT'S MY MOTTO AND EVIDENTLY NOT
YOURS. TAKE A WEEK'S NOTICE."]

[Illustration: ACT II. (_a week elapses_). THE OFFICE-BOY'S FAREWELL.]

* * * * *

LONDON'S LINKS WITH THE PAST.

When I was a child I had the signal honour of being seated upon the knee
of an old lady whose great-great-great-great-uncle once shook hands with
a man whose grandfather remembered seeing green fields at the spot which
is now covered by Carmelite House. How short is the history of the
Metropolis!

Everybody, of course, is aware that Professor Joff committed one of his
notorious "howlers" when he derived "Carmelite"--in the street
name--from "Cromwell's Heights." The latter, needless to say, must have
been a deal nearer the South Kensington Museum than Whitefriars, famed
for its sanctuary. CROMWELL _may_ have wandered in the meadows (if they
still existed in his day) where the 6.30 _News_ now leaps from its
machines every afternoon about half-past five; he may even (as Plip and
Johnstone surmise, in their ponderous tomes, _Odd Corners in London_ and
_More and Odder Corners in London_) have supped at the Pig and
Mortarboard, which stood on what is now the site of the Ludgate Hill
station booking-office (Plip, by-the-by, wrongly says not the
booking-office, but the "book_stall_," an amazing error in one usually
so careful). But whatever else CROMWELL did or did not do, he certainly
never gave his name to any district further east than Knightsbridge.

I flatter myself that Professor Joff's preposterous surmises were
finally silenced by my monograph, _A Hundred Queer Things about Bouverie
Street._ Curiously enough I wrote this with a pencil borrowed from a
friend whose aunt once caught sight, as a girl, of a prisoner being
taken to the Old Bailey to be tried for murder. That prisoner was the
notorious Budgingham. And now comes t