nd custom in between.
Yes; we may pass the heavenly screen,
But shall we know when we are there?
Who know not what these dead stones mean,
The lovely city of Lierre.'"

Here the train stopped abruptly. And from Mechlin church steeple we
heard the half-chime: and Joris broke silence with "No bally HORS
D'OEUVRES for me: I shall get on to something solid at once."

L'Envoy

Prince, wide your Empire spreads, I ween,
Yet happier is that moistened Mayor,
Who drinks her cognac far from fine,
The lovely city of Lierre.

XXXIX. The Mystery of a Pageant

Once upon a time, it seems centuries ago, I was prevailed on to take
a small part in one of those historical processions or pageants which
happened to be fashionable in or about the year 1909. And since I tend,
like all who are growing old, to re-enter the remote past as a paradise
or playground, I disinter a memory which may serve to stand among those
memories of small but strange incidents with which I have sometimes
filled this column. The thing has really some of the dark qualities of
a detective-story; though I suppose that Sherlock Holmes himself could
hardly unravel it now, when the scent is so old and cold and most of the
actors, doubtless, long dead.

This old pageant included a series of figures from the eighteenth
century, and I was told that I was just like Dr. Johnson. Seeing that
Dr. Johnson was heavily seamed with small-pox, had a waistcoat all over
gravy, snorted and rolled as he walked, and was probably the ugliest man
in London, I mention this identification as a fact and not as a vaunt. I
had nothing to do with the arrangement; and such fleeting suggestions as
I made were not taken so seriously as they might have been. I requested
that a row of posts be erected across the lawn, so that I might touch
all of them but one, and then go back and touch that. Failing this, I
felt that the least they could do was to have twenty-five cups of tea
stationed at regular intervals along the course, each held by a Mrs.
Thrale in full costume. My best constructive suggestion was the most
harshly rejected of all. In front of me in the procession walked the
great Bishop Berkeley, the man who turned the tables on the early
materialists by maintaining that matter itself possibly does not exist.
Dr. Johnson, you will remember, did not like such bottomless fancies as
Berkeley's, and kicked a stone with his foot, say