will the water come down through the floor

When mains are unfrozen and pipes are all "busting"?

Why spurting and squirting, with rush and with roar,

The wall-papers staining, the fire-irons rusting,

And rushing, and gushing, and flashing and splashing,

And making a sort of Aix douche of the bedroom,

And comfort destroying, and every hope dashing,

And leaving one scarce a square yard of dry head-room.

[Slams door, and retires in dudgeon.

Motto for Stockbrokers.—A mine in the Randt is worth two in the Bush.

QUARTER-DAY; OR, DEMAND AND NO SUPPLY.

Ratepayer. "WHAT'S THIS FOR? WATER! WHY I HAVEN'T HAD ANY!"

THE WOMAN WHO WOULDN'T DO.

(She-Note Series.)

The two were seated in an untrammelled Bohemian sort of way on the imperturbable expanse of the South Downs. Beneath them was a carpet of sheep-sorrel, its orbicular perianth being slightly depressed by their healthy weight. In the distance they noticed thankfully the saucer-shaped combes of paludina limestone rising in pleasant strata to the rearing scarp of the Weald. Perugino Allan was the gentleman's name. He had only met Pseudonymia Bampton the day before, but already from mere community of literary instincts they were life-long friends. She had reached the trysting-place first. All true modest women do this.

"Pseudonymia!" said Perugino, blushing easily to his finger-tips.

"Perugino!" said Pseudonymia, blushing to hers. It was early, of course, for Christian names, but then the Terewth had made them Free-and-Easy.

"Perugino!" said Pseudonymia, bringing her eyes back from the infinite to rest without affectation on her simple Greek chiton, "I have often wanted to meet a real man who had written a book with a key to it on the back of the cover. Now tell me frankly some more beautiful things about our present loathsome system of chartered monogamy, so degrading to my sex. Talk straight on, please, pages at a time. Never mind about Probability. Terewth is stranger than Probability; and the Terewth, you know, shall make you Free!"

Perugino sank back into the spongy turf, leaning his cheek against an upright spike of summer furze of the genus Ulex Europæus. "Some men," he began, "ignoble souls, 'look about' them before they marry. Such are calculating egoists. Pure souls, of finer paste, are, so to speak, born married. Others hesitate and delay. The difficulties of teething, a paltry desire to be weaned before the wedding, reluctance to being married in long clothes, the terrors of croup during the honeymoon—these and other excuses, thinly veiling hidden depths of depravity, are employed to defer the divine moment. I have known men to reach the preposterously ripe age of one-and-twenty unwedded, protesting that they dare not risk their prospects at the Bar. These men can never mate like the birds, never be guide-posts to point humanity along the path of Terewth."

"But," interrupted Pseudonymia, rose-red to her quivering finger-tips with shame at the bare mention of marriage; "but I thought you disapproved of the debasing principle of wedlock."

"Do not interrupt," said Perugino, kindly; "I will come to that two or three pages later on. To be prudent, I was going to say, is to be vicious and cruel. Of course it is not given to all to be born married. But this natal defect one can easily remedy. I knew a young fellow who did. The indispensable complement crossed his path before it was too late. He was still at his preparatory school; he married the matron. True, there was disparity of age, but it was a step in the right direction; though the head-master, a man of common conventional ideas, gave the boy a severe rebuke.

"But to push on at once to contradictions. Marriage, I have said elsewhere, is a degrading system, nurtured under the purple hangings of the tents of iniquity. In my gospel Love, like Terewth, should be Free; ever moving on, moving on. Now, Italy is the home——"

"Ah!" cried Pseudonymia, "Italy! That reminds me of sunburnt Siena. What a wonderful Peruguinesque chapter that was in your book. Like a leaf torn out of the live heart of Baedeker!"

"Italy," continued Perugino doggedly, "is the home of backgrounds. I would like everyone to have a background—a past; the more pasts the better. Is not that a beautiful thought? Ever moving on to something different!"

"That has been the dream of my childhood," said Pseudonymia, her white Cordelia-like soul thrilled through and through with sacred convictions. A ripe gorse-pod burst in the basking sunlight. ("I never remember seeing sunlight bask before," she thought.) A bumble-bee said something inaudible. "But why," she added, "did you never give this pure sentiment to the world before? You who have written so many many books?"

"My child," replied the artist, "I was compelled to write down to the public taste. One must consider one's prospects. This, you will say, seems to clash with what I said before about calculating egoists. But profession and practice are ever divorced under our depraved system of civilisation. At last, having established myself, I rose superior to sordid avarice, and wrote for once solely to satisfy my own taste and conscience."

"A noble sacrifice!" said Pseudonymia, suppressing her dimples for the moment. "As the physically weaker vessel, I could only have done it under an assumed name. But tell me of one difficulty which you have so cleverly avoided in your book. This question of the family. Will not a confusion arise in another generation when nobody quite knows who and how many his or her half-brothers and half-sisters are?"

"Pseudonymia!" said Perugino, and his voice broke in two places, "I am pained. I had thought that you, so pure, so emancipate, would have had a soul above blithering detail. Besides, do you not see that in this way the whole world will eventually become one family? We may not