according to your anonymous correspondent. If he’d been vicious he might have said something like this:

The Poet grinned. “I’m not complaining about it. It’s a mighty nice little verse, I think, and my only regret is that I do not know who the chap was who sent it. I’d like to thank him. I had an idea you might help me,” he said, with a searching glance.

“I will,” said the Idiot. “If the man who sent you that ever reveals his identity to me I will tell him you fell all over yourself with joy on receiving his tribute of admiration. How did you come out, Doctor?”

“Oh, he remembered me, all right,” said the Doctor. “Quite in the same vein, too, only he’s not so complimentary. He calls me ‘The Humane Surgeon,’ and runs into rhyme after this fashion:

“He must have had some experience with you, Doctor,” said the Idiot. “In fact, he knows you so well that I am inclined to think that the writer of that valentine lives in this house, and it is just possible that the culprit is seated at this table at this moment.”

“I think it very likely,” said the Doctor, dryly. “He’s a fresh young man, five feet ten inches in height—”

“Pooh—pooh!” said the Idiot. “That’s the worst description of Mr. Brief I ever heard. Mr. Brief, in the first place, is not a young man, and he isn’t fresh—”

“I didn’t mean Mr. Brief,” said the Doctor, significantly.

“Then you ought to be ashamed of yourself to intimate that Mr. Whitechoker, a clergyman, would stoop to the writing of such a rhyme as that,” cried the Idiot. “People nowadays seem to me to be utterly lacking in that respect for the cloth to which it is entitled. Mr. Brief, if you really wrote that thing you owe it to Mr. Whitechoker to own up and thus relieve him of the suspicion the Doctor has so unblushingly cast upon him.”

“I can prove an alibi,” said the Lawyer. “I could no more turn a rhyme than I could play ‘Parsifal’ on a piano with one finger, and I wouldn’t if I could. I judge, from what I know of the market value of poems these days, that that valentine of the Doctor’s is worth about two dollars. It would take me a century to write it, and inasmuch as my time is worth at least five dollars a year it stands to reason that I would not put in five hundred dollars’ worth of effort on a two-dollar job. So that lets me out. By-the-way, I got one of these trifles myself. Want to hear it?”

“I am just crazy to hear it,” said the Idiot. “If any man has reduced you to poetry, Mr. Brief, he’s a great man. With all your many virtues, you seem to me to fit into a poetical theme about as snugly as an automobile with full power on in a china-shop. By all means let us have it.”

“This modern St. Valentine of ours has reduced the profession to verse with a nicety that elicits my most profound admiration,” said Mr. Brief. “Just listen to this: