Masters anxiously. "They told me at the hairdresser's that Macnaughton, Macnaughton, Macnaughton, Macnaughton & Macnaughton was the tleverest firm in London.”

"We can do it," said John simply; "but it will require all our care, and I think it would be best if I were to come and stay with you for the weekend. We could go into it properly then.".

"Thank you," said Mr. Masters, clasping the other's hand. "I was just going to suggest it. My motor car is outside. Let us go at once."

"I will follow you in a moment," said John, and pausing only to snatch a handful of money from the safe for incidental expenses and to tell the boy that he would be back on Monday he picked up the well-filled week-end bag which he always kept ready, and hurried after the other.

Inside the car Mr. Masters was confidential.

"My daughter," he said, "comes of age to-morrow."

"Oh, it's a daughter?" said John in surprise. "Is she pretty?"

"She is considered to be the prettiest girl in the county."

"Really?" said John. He thought a moment, and added. "Can we stop at a post-office? I must send an important business telegram." He took out a form and wrote "Macmacmacmacmac, London. Shall not be back till Wednesday.-Blunt."

The car stopped and then sped on again.

"Amy has never been any trouble to me," said Mr. Masters, "but I am getting old now, and I would give a thousand pounds to see her happily married."

"To whom would you give it?" asked John, whipping out his pocket-book.

"Tut, tut, a mere figure of speech. But I would settle a hundred thousand pounds on her on the wedding day."

"Indeed?" said John thoughtfully. "Can we stop at another post-office?" he added, bringing out his fountain pen again. He took out a second telegraph form and wrote: "Macmacmacmacmac, London. Shall not be back till Friday.-Blunt."

The car dashed on again, and an hour later arrived at a commodious mansion standing in its own well-timbered grounds of upwards of several acres. At the front-door a graceful figure was standing.

"My solicitor, dear, Mr. Blunt," said Mr. Masters.

"It is very good of you to come all this way on my father's business," she said shyly.

"Not at all," said John. "A week or -or a fortnight-or-" he looked at her again- "or-three weeks, and the thing is done."

“Is making a will so very difficult?” "It's a very tricky and complicated affair indeed. However, I think we shall pull it off. Er-might I send an important business telegram?" "Macmacmacmacmac, London," wrote John. "Very knotty case. Date of return uncertain. Please send more cash for incidental expenses.-Blunt."

Yes, you have guessed what happened. It is an every-day experience in a solicitor's life. John Blunt and Amy Masters were married at St. George's, Hanover Square, last May. The wedding was a quiet one owing to mourning in the bride's family-the result of a too sudden perusal of Macnaughton, Macnaughton, Macnaughton, Macnaughton & Macnaughton's bill of costs. As Mr. Masters said with his expiring breath-he didn't mind paying for our Mr. Blunt's skill; nor yet for our Mr. Blunt's valuable time-even if most of it was spent in courting Amy; nor, again, for our Mr. Blunt's tips to the servants; but he did object to being charged the first-class

railway fare both ways when our Mr. Blunt had come down and gone up again in the car. And perhaps I ought

Punch.

to add that that is the drawback to this fine profession. One is so often misunderstood.

A. A. M.

Whether it was due to a touch of influenza or too much work or not enough smoke I know not, but I lately had an attack of nerves. That is one of the many evils which we arrogantly call the disease of the age, but of course civilized humanity has always suffered from its nerves, and even savage humanity, overstrained with prolonged hunting or fighting, must have been irritable the next day. With me such an attack is rare, or at least such an attack as that of late, when it was really a severe effort to endure the futilities and ineptitudes of my fellow creatures, so that unlike the habitual neuropath I can note and record how it affected me, can moralize about it, can walk round it, as it were, and philosophize. The pleasure I offer my readers is that of recognition. It is not a sublime pleasure, but it is a considerable one and explains why anybody reads works of everyday life or eighteenth-century dairies of travels on the continent or why anybody goes to the average drawing-room comedy. So "how true!" will one reader say, and "I'm just like that" another will say, and we ought to be quite happy and comfortable together. And the pleasure I propose to myself is pure egotism.

I am not in the least ashamed of the attack, convinced that it came from no fault of mine. Considering, indeed, the trials to which circumstances and man subject me, I believe my cheerful

them, when I have my next attack, not to be so snappy and intolerant with me.. The very people to whose bad nerves I am as a rule a sort of unpaid doctor with my solicitude and tolerance, are the first to cry out against me, when for once in a way I give them back a bit of their own. And that is my first observation, that people in a "state" of nerves expect every one else to have nerves of iron. I was like that, myself. The idea that any one else should be bored or irritated by my fretfulness and irritability under the common little trials of daily life, seemed to me the last inhuman outrage possible.

It would be superfluous to remark the examples of things always irritating which are made worse by nerves; that is too obvious an effect for even an essayist; we must consider sensations and moods which nerves really bring into being. The exception, however, I would make by your leave, because it gives me an opportunity of saying something by way of an irrelevant digression which otherwise would have to be turned into a whole article by itself a thrifty proceeding but opposed to my sense of fairness. I have written at one time or another so many articles, letters to the editor, and so forth, upon the insane worship of individualism, which makes us allow ourselves to be driven into madhouses and early graves by the untimely noises of builders-I have written so many articles and letters about it in vain, and in vain appealed so often to the sympathy of healthily sleeping and unimaginative friends, that I am ashamed to inflict

another whole article on yet another editor: besides, he might have the impertinence not to print it. But tortured by builders beyond the usual extent during my attack of nerves, I made a study of their methods, which resulted in an interesting discovery. You may have noticed, when a house is being built or repaired or demolished in your neighborhood, that work which is not intolerably noisy for the rest of the day, makes a fiendish and inconceivable uproar in the early morning. You have wondered at the unmathematical coincidence that the earliest work is always the noisiest, and so used I to wonder until I found out the truth. It is not a coincidence at all, and is not even work, that early uproar. It is a ritual which comes right down from the Middle Ages, when it was instituted to awaken to their tasks the unhappy serfs whom the curfew had sent to bed. Its name is Hell Let Loose, and it is performed by banging on iron girders, beating any metal things handy against one another, kicking those otherwise purposeless wooden erections you must have seen, shouting all together, making any other noise ingenuity and malice may suggest. It is useless to try to abolish this custom; the workmen enjoy it, disliking that any one else should sleep while they have to be up, and cling to the tradition; their Trade Union is too strong, and more likely to reimpose the Curfew on the rest of us than let us sleep our morning sleep. A frank digression, which I hope you will pardon: I thought you might like to know.

As I said, I will not dwell on the commonly annoying things which nerves make worse-the malice of inanimate objects, the dulness of talkative humanity, the rain at precisely the most inconvenient moment, the fatuity of articles in newspapers, all the common afflictions which nerves merely make to appear more insistent and harder to

bear. The mere effects of course vary with all of us: I can but mention mine on the probability that some of my readers have the same. The most marked is an absolute hatred of humanity in the mass. As a rule I rather like it, in my confounded superior, observant way. I console myself for the discomfort of tubes and 'buses by the thought that there is something inhumanly aloof and haughty in the expensive taxi-cab. If some wise measure of Tariff Reform-or some folly of Free Trade-were to export two-thirds of our population to Canada and we were again a mainly agricultural community, England would be a pleasanter place, no doubt, but there would still be crowds in popular resorts. They are inevitable, and I don't mind them; provided that they are not too stuffy or throaty or expectoratory, they do not spoil my enjoyment of theatres or processions through the streets. My, attack of nerves made them merely loathsome. I shrank through back streets, and would not have gone to a successful play or a race meeting if any one had offered to pay for me. A crowded omnibus seemed to be so horrible, so morbidly suggestive of the terror and horror of too prolific nature, that I got out and walked in the rain. That was one new effect; a second marked one was hatred of individual strangers. Normally, no doubt, we pass from time to time in the street men and women whom a beneficent autocrat would have slain at once, merely on account of their arrogant, insolent, esurient, predatory, vile, repulsive faces, but we do not see very many of them, and I for one would kill very few fellow creatures-outside my acquaintance-in any ordinary week. In my nervous state I saw those betterdead brutes by the shoal and would have ticked off lives as you play the piano. In truth an unusually kindly nature was warped. (Unusually

kindly, I am sure. I notice it in the case of the rich. Most people hate the rich, apart from those they happen to like individually, merely because they are rich, and it is human nature to have an extra glass of port after dinner when a millionaire has been run over by an omnibus, whereas I could barely find time.) Dreadful to think one's soul may be so ill affected by some trumpery physical cause, is it not?

Things which would have been amusing any other time drove me wild. For example, I read an interview with Mr. Hichens, in which that novelist-whose books no one enjoys more than I-was made to say: "it always gives me pleasure to depict the female character." I don't suppose he can have said it, but anyhow some human brain did conceive the phrase, and there is something so sublimely bland and fatuous about it, as though Mr. Hichens calmly The Eye-Witness.

and easily and with pleasure achieved that which has called out at its strongest the genius of Tolstoi or of Meredith, something so monstrously inclusive, as though he thought all women were alike and could be "depicted" at a sitting, that any power of humor and irony in me foundered in amazement as I read. But what would have delighted me at any other time infuriated me at this. So did some things which are wont to be only tiresome, like the humbug of politicians, about which I got as angry as Mr. Belloc. Moreover-but you see the sort of change made in me by this attack of nerves. I shall be slow to judge such symptoms in others in future as marks of a permanently embittered nature. As for all the little exaggerated imitations and fussinesses with which I have always borne in turn I shall continue to bear with them in increased understanding. But I repeat that I look for reciprocity. G. 8. Street.

In this season of family gatherings it may not be unprofitable to consider the changes which a generation has brought about in the relations of parents and children. There is both humor and pathos in the new situation. The seed sown by Spencer's "Education" in the mid-Victorian age, watered by copious streams of Rationalism, Socialism, and Humanitarianism, has now produced its first fully-ripened crop, the grown-up children of to-day. What are we to say of the fruits of enlightenment? Has wisdom been justified of her children? Few parents, either of the enlightened or of the old conventional order, will be inclined to answer these questions in a tone of confident optimism. For in truth, parents of to-day hardly know where they stand in relation to their children.

The revolt against the old traditional status of authority and arbitrary discipline was natural and necessary. It was in the structure of the family the counterpart of the struggle against irrational authority in Church and State. For the day of the autocratic family was passing. "Revered Sir," as the opening of a letter, had already lost its emotional reality: the airs of preposterous dignity and self-importance, which fathers of the upper and middle classes had assumed within the home, were yielding before the sceptical humor of modern times. The crude idea of education by "breaking the will," as a preliminary process to the enforced formation of correct habits and the insertion of useful knowledge and elegant accomplishments, was giving place to a gentler and more reason

At

able method. The new word "Psychology" was beginning to teach a finer art of child-culture, the first principle of which was that the child-nature should be allowed to grow in an atmosphere of liberty, free within wide limits to choose its own pursuits and follow its own tastes, the parent and the teacher unobtrusively performing some processes of selection and rejection, suggestion and stimulation. the very time when the inadequacy of "the simple system of natural liberty" was being discarded in politics and industry, the doctrine in all its naïveté was accepted as a method of education by hosts of enlightened parents. The situation was an inevitable fruit of the spirit of self-criticism everywhere abroad. Parents knew that they were neither so wise nor so good as the old idea of paternal authority demanded, and they were tolerably sure that if they assumed virtues and powers which were unreal, the modern child would find them out. Among the educated middle classes this new discovery chimed in with a general all-round slackening of the old rigors and orthodoxies of belief and conduct. Probably the gradual increase of the influence of the wife and mother in the ordering of home life contributed not a little to soften the discipline and to break down the old emotional barriers.

In many enlightened families the Spencerian policy of modified anarchy has been carried out, and children have been born, reared, and have grown up to maturity under this liberal régim?. Instead of being "kept in their places," and "taught to mind," they have been brought up in an atmosphere of liberty, equality, and fraternity; their voices have been raised, often determinately, in every family council, their real or supposed interests have always been sedulously studied, their wishes, even their whims, have been regarded as carrying some sacred freight of in

tuitive wisdom. Though the unruly domination of the child which pervades America is in this country a more moderate government, whole grades of society exist where the brief tutelage of infancy yields to an era of voluntary abdication on the part of parents, or of easy management on the part of children. In considerable measure this is due, without doubt, to the diminished size of the family. Rarity enhances value, and though, so far as physical nature is concerned, the small number of children has been advantageous, it is more likely that the net moral effect has been detrimental. For the higher value set upon the individual child has led more educated and conscientious parents into grave excesses of affection and solicitude. Having all their eggs in one basket, they are over anxious, and this anxiety shows itself in an excessive interference, which they vainly seek to reconcile with their theory of free, selfdetermined growth. The effect of this parental solicitude upon the child will vary with its temperament. Sometimes it will act as a fretful irritant, taken far more hardly than the old authoritative discipline which pretended no reason and admitted no discussion. But the more usual effect is to evoke in the child an excess of conscious self-importance, corresponding to the high significance parents attach to all its doings.

It is natural for every child to take all that is offered, and to employ to the full the power which experience shows it to possess over its elders, for in no other way is the sense of growing personality so richly nourished. What can be more flattering and more subversive of modesty than for a child to realize by a long, unceasing round of observation and experiment that it is the pivot of the family? Like every despotism, this, too, evokes its intellectual defences, and we are to-day