r 'nother fortnight. Better come out."

After one or two ineffectual attempts he managed to pitch the key of the
cow-house door in through the window. Then, lifting his voice in the
strains of "I'm afraid to go home in the dark," with a lusty drum
accompaniment, he led the way back to the house. The hurried procession
of the released that followed in his steps came in for a good deal of the
adverse comment that his exuberant display had evoked.

It was the happiest Christmas Eve he had ever spent. To quote his own
words, he had a rotten Christmas.

FOREWARNED

Alethia Debchance sat in a corner of an otherwise empty railway carriage,
more or less at ease as regarded body, but in some trepidation as to
mind. She had embarked on a social adventure of no little magnitude as
compared with the accustomed seclusion and stagnation of her past life.
At the age of twenty-eight she could look back on nothing more eventful
than the daily round of her existence in her aunt's house at
Webblehinton, a hamlet four and a half miles distant from a country town
and about a quarter of a century removed from modern times. Their
neighbours had been elderly and few, not much given to social
intercourse, but helpful or politely sympathetic in times of illness.
Newspapers of the ordinary kind were a rarity; those that Alethia saw
regularly were devoted exclusively either to religion or to poultry, and
the world of politics was to her an unheeded unexplored region. Her
ideas on life in general had been acquired through the medium of popular
respectable novel-writers, and modified or emphasised by such knowledge
as her aunt, the vicar, and her aunt's housekeeper had put at her
disposal. And now, in her twenty-ninth year, her aunt's death had left
her, well provided for as regards income, but somewhat isolated in the
matter of kith and kin and human companionship. She had some cousins who
were on terms of friendly, though infrequent, correspondence with her,
but as they lived permanently in Ceylon, a locality about which she knew
little, beyond the assurance contained in the missionary hymn that the
human element there was vile, they were not of much immediate use to her.
Other cousins she also possessed, more distant as regards relationship,
but not quite so geographically remote, seeing that they lived somewhere
in the Midlands. She could hardly remember ever having met them, but
once or twice in the course of the last three