It was a difficult position.  There was no time to submit the cakes to the X-rays; the advance party was streaming through the gate.

“Dear fellows!  I wonder which one it will be,” said Emily, and clung round my neck.

I put her on one side.  “I’ll manage it; leave it to me,” I said, and went forward and welcomed our guests.  My mind was working clearly and rapidly, as it always does in a crisis.  When I had got them seated round the tea-table, “My dear friends,” I said, “this isn’t a Christmas party, but my wife couldn’t help indulging in a little Christmas fun.  She’s just whispered to me that she’s put a surprise in one of the cakes.  I know her.  It won’t be an ordinary sort of surprise.  I should advise you all to keep a sharp look-out.  There’s a pound” (it was worth a pound to save a hero’s throat from being cut) “for the man who finds anything in his cake which hasn’t any business to be there.”

Within five minutes two pebbles, a tin-tack, a chunk of wood and a black-beetle were on the tablecloth....

“Do you know that flutter’s cost me five pounds, and there wasn’t a sign of your infernal knife after all?” I said to Emily when they’d gone.

“I’ve just found it under the kitchen table,” said Emily.  “I am thankful.”

* * * * *

    “This company’s year ended on the 40th June, and a good
    distribution is looked for by the market.”—­Journal of
    Commerce.

With such help from the calendar any company should do well.

* * * * *

THE SIGNAL SECTION.

You know how the great hunter who sleeps with his gun at his pillow is awake in an instant, with all his faculties alert, when the sacred spider breaks a twig in the jungle?  You remember how the handsome highwayman, at the first far clatter of hoofs on the great North Road, is up and out on the scullery roof of the inn before you have turned the page, and is deep in Lonely Copse (wearing the serving-wench’s stomacher) before his first fat pursuer has said, “Open in the name of the Law,” below his window?  Well, like Jimmy’s bloodhound in Punch, I am very good at that.

But it is a telephone-bell that does it.  You go down seventy-two steps—­backwards, or you hit your head—­to a German room, which smells German, and you will find my boudoir, furnished with sandbags, a shaving mirror and a telephone.

At eleven o’clock I lie on the sandbags and, like the great hunter, close my eyes immediately in dreamless sleep.

At five minutes past eleven the telephone-bell rings.

That is what I am good at.  I leap to my feet and say “Hullo!”

Utter silence follows, save (as Mr. BEACH THOMAS would say) for the monotonous drone of the great shells bursting outside.

I repeat my original remark.  “Hullo!” I say brightly, “Hullo!... 
Hullo!”