name of the street even. How could I have foreseen? Well, anyhow I didn't, or I shouldn't have tipped him on the stairs.

With many nods and winks I gave my wife the hint how I had managed it, and we went about the house whispering and hobnobbing in odd corners like a couple of conspirators while he began the work of installation.

Then the first dreadful moment came. Suddenly he addressed me by my name, with a certain suspicious interrogation in his tone.

"Who?" I asked blandly, going as red as a turkey-cock, of course; I never can help it.

He looked surprised and I plunged heavily, giving the first name I could think of, which happened to be the one he had mentioned in the taxi—his own, in fact. He looked still more suspicious and I knew it had been a mistake, especially as close to where he had been working were two envelopes addressed to me. I am certain that if my wife had not called me at that moment I should have gone permanently purple all over.

When I got back (I tried to get my wife to go, but she said she would rather I went, and that I wasn't really as red as I felt)—when I got back I could see that it had dawned upon him that I had wheedled him there without his knowing exactly where he was, and that he was determined not to be had. He asked me to sign for the installation.

Alas, I could not do that. It was only then that I realised that I am constitutionally honest; besides they might find me out.

We both tried to turn his thoughts to pleasanter topics. Perhaps asking him to have a glass of port was a mistake there are times when even bribery is bad policy. Briefly, after a mumbled remark that "there was something fishy," he refused to leave the box. Dry-eyed we watched him take it all down and depart in a dudgeon. We were left with a vision of shameless visitors with their twopenny calls and interminable bills running up even while we were away on our holidays.

"Let us," I said hoarsely—"let us go and look at our child; she is all we have left now."

Moodily we turned to go upstairs. In the hall we stopped dead. Upon the floor was the wretched paper which my Victorian conscience and my twentieth-century caution had prevented me from signing.

"He must," said my wife with her usual perspicacity, "have dropped it on his way out. Let's see who the box was really meant for."

Picking it up I read aloud in cold firm tones my own name and address. The box had been meant for us after all.

We got it in the end. It came one morning, like the flowers in Spring, quite suddenly, and we spent a whole day telephoning to our friends to tell them we had a coin-box at last. I also wrote a letter full of gratitude to the telephone people and got the reply that, "owing to the shortage of plant, etc.," they regretted that for the time being they could not grant my request for a telephone.

We did not tell them that we had had one for three months; Heaven knows what would have happened.

And we are left in peace—now that our visitors have heard that we have a coin-box.

L.

THE PIONEERS.

SUPPOSED ORIGIN OF UNDERGROUND TACTICS.

TWO "STEIN"-WAY GRANDS.

By a Philistine.

Mrs. Faulkner (to District Visitor). "Nicely, thank you, Miss, except for a poisoned 'and. For the rest of 'em, Father's in hospital, little Florrie's scalded herself and baby's got the whooping-cough. It be a blessing that troubles don't come singly or else there'd be no end to it."

"Disputing Sergt. Alvan C. York's claim as the world war's greatest hero, Sergt. Mike Donaldson of New York has challenged the Tennessean to a debate on who is the greatest war hero."—New Haven Journal-Courier (U.S.A.)

Without waiting for the result of this unique contest Mr. Punch has no hesitation in saying that between them these warriors are responsible for the mightiest "blow" of the War.

The Colonel (at the end of his vocabulary). "What did Lord Fisher say in 1919?"

FROM THE DANCE WORLD.

(By our Ballet Expert.)

The Daily Graphic announces that Mr. Arnold Bennett has "fallen a willing victim to the latest fashionable dances," and is having lessons in them "in the privacy of his Hanover Square home." A thousand entrancing possibilities are opened up by this bald announcement. We are content to supplement it by a few authentic details.

Mr. Bennett, who does nothing by halves, has mapped out a programme which will occupy his energies for at least two years. First comes the period of pupilship, which will last for six months. Then a year on the stage; then six months devoted to the composition of three novels and three plays, each with a Terpsichorean motive. Already, while engaged on his daily exercises, Mr. Bennett has found time to revise the titles of some of his earlier works in keeping with his present aims, and two of these have now been appropriately rechristened Anna Pavlova of the Five Towns and Helen of the High Kick.

In the actual technique of his adopted art Mr. Bennett has already shown extraordinary progress. The other day, while a wedding party was just about to leave St. George's, Hanover Square, Mr. Bennett, who happened to be passing by, took a flying caracole clean over the Rolls-Royce which contained the happy pair. Those who witnessed the feat say that it eclipsed Nijinsky in his most elastic mood. But Mr. Bennett is not satisfied, and declined an invitation to appear at the Devonshire House Ball last week on the ground that his achievement does not yet square with his ambition. Moreover he has decided not to dance in public under his real name, but is not yet quite certain whether to choose the artistic pseudonym of Ben Netsky or Cinquecittà—probably the latter.

Above all he is firmly resolved to preserve in his dancing the sympathetic and humanistic tone of his presentation of life in his books. It will be a message of hope. He is determined by his gestural artistry and resilient thistle-downiness to "sanction and fortify the natural human passion for believing that life can somehow, behind all the miseries and the mysteries, mean something profoundly worth while." To render justice to his mental and physical agility is beyond our powers.

We have been driven to culling this