closed. A
lady who lives in the West End was expressing to me the other day her
interest in West Highland terriers, and her desire to know more about the
breed, so when, a few days later, I came across an exhaustive article on
that subject in the current number of one of our best known outdoor-life
weeklies, I mentioned that circumstance in a letter, giving the date of
that number. "I cannot get the paper," was her telephoned response. And
she couldn't. She lived in a city where newsagents are numbered, I
suppose, by the thousand, and she must have passed dozens of such shops
in her daily shopping excursions, but as far as she was concerned that
article on West Highland terriers might as well have been written in a
missal stored away in some Buddhist monastery in Eastern Thibet.

The brutal directness of the masculine shopper arouses a certain
combative derision in the feminine onlooker. A cat that spreads one
shrew-mouse over the greater part of a long summer afternoon, and then
possibly loses him, doubtless feels the same contempt for the terrier who
compresses his rat into ten seconds of the strenuous life. I was
finishing off a short list of purchases a few afternoons ago when I was
discovered by a lady of my acquaintance whom, swerving aside from the
lead given us by her godparents thirty years ago, we will call Agatha.

"You're surely not buying blotting-paper _here_?" she exclaimed in an
agitated whisper, and she seemed so genuinely concerned that I stayed my
hand.

"Let me take you to Winks and Pinks," she said as soon as we were out of
the building: "they've got such lovely shades of blotting-paper--pearl
and heliotrope and _momie_ and crushed--"

"But I want ordinary white blotting-paper," I said.

"Never mind. They know me at Winks and Pinks," she replied
inconsequently. Agatha apparently has an idea that blotting-paper is
only sold in small quantities to persons of known reputation, who may be
trusted not to put it to dangerous or improper uses. After walking some
two hundred yards she began to feel that her tea was of more immediate
importance than my blotting-paper.

"What do you want blotting-paper for?" she asked suddenly. I explained
patiently.

"I use it to dry up the ink of wet manuscript without smudging the
writing. Probably a Chinese invention of the second century before
Christ, but I'm not sure. The only other use for it that I can think of
is to roll it into a ball for a kitt