* * * * *

[Illustration:  Comforting thought

When there are no taxis on your return from your holidays: 

“Our true Strength is to know our own weakness.”—­CHARLES KINGSLEY.]

* * * * *

The end of an episode.

I write this in the beginning of a minor tragedy; if indeed the severance of any long, helpful and sympathetic association can ever be so lightly named.  For that is precisely what our intercourse has been these many weeks past; one of nervous and quickly roused irritation on my part, of swift and gentle ministration on his.

At least once a day we have met during that period (and occasionally, though rarely, more often), usually in those before-breakfast hours when the temper of normal man is most exacting and uncertain.  But his temper never varied; the perfection of it was indeed among his finest qualities.  Morning after morning, throughout a time that, as it chanced, has been full of distress and disappointment, would his soothing and infinitely gentle touch recall me to content.  That stroking caress of his was a thing indescribable; one before which the black shadows left by the hours of night seemed literally to dissolve and vanish.

And now the long expected, long dreaded has begun to happen.  He, too, is turning against me, as so many others of his fellows have done in the past.  Who knows the reason?  What continued roughness on my part has at last worn out even him?  But for some days now there has been no misreading the fatal symptoms—­increasing irritability on the one side, harshness turning to blunt indifference on the other.  And this morning came the unforgivable offence, the cut direct.

That settles it; to-morrow, with a still smarting regret, I unwrap a new razor-blade.

* * * * *

The whole hog.

    ["Victorian love-making was at best a sloppy business ... modern
    maidens have little use for half measures....  Primitive ideas
    are beginning to assert themselves.”—­Daily Paper.]

  Betty, when you were in your teens
    And shielded from sensation,
  Despite a lack of ways and means
  In various appropriate scenes
    I sighed my adoration. 
  You did not smile upon my suit;
    Pallid I grew and pensive;
  My disappointment was acute,
  Life seemed a worthless thing and mute. 
  I moped, then tuned my laggard lute
    And launched a new offensive.

  Thus you were wooed in former days
    When maids were won by waiting;
  The modern lover finds it pays
  To imitate the forceful ways
    Of prehistoric mating. 
  Man is more primitive (a snub
    Has no effect), so if you
  Should still refuse a certain “sub.” 
  He will not pine or spurn his grub,
  But, seizing the ancestral club,
    Into submission biff you.