They smiled, and Beppo said, "Sure, we'll ask her," and then we all laughed. I suppose we were a trifle fatuous about them and treated them more as delicious playthings than as human beings. They bore it very well, however, and after dinner, when my friend, in spite of his long tramp and a "job" half done upstairs in the studio, played the piano, and did conjuring tricks with a handkerchief and a glass of water, and then got out a concertina which had often wakened the echoes of King's Road, Chelsea, in the small hours, they were in raptures. The concertina certainly impressed them as "a divine box of sounds." After "Church Bells in the Distance" they jumped and clapped their hands and said "Bully!" A new and appreciative audience is always stimulating to an artist. My friend surpassed himself. He told them about the London costers, how they had hundreds of pearl buttons and velvet collared coats and wide bell-mouthed trousers, how they played the concertina so beautifully that the policemen in the streets wept into their helmets and the King came out of his palace and danced a jig with the Lord Mayor outside the Mansion House. And he told them how it sometimes chanced the coster got drunk on his way home, and this made him play very pathetically indeed like this ... and then the broken strains of "Two Lovely Black Eyes" came forth, but ended abruptly in a squeak. That, they were told, was his wife, Eliza, who had come out and slapped him. Eliza had joined the Salvation Army and sang only hymns. This was the prelude to "Where is My Wandering Boy To-night?" rendered in a way, Bill remarked _sotto voce_, calculated to keep him wandering. But Beppo and Ben sat on the edge of their chairs, entranced. It was evidently a novel evening for them. We put the concertina away and got a drawing-board with a sheet of paper and a stick of charcoal, and everybody had to draw a pig blindfold. The usual fragmentary animals appeared, some so embryonic as to be unrecognizable by their designers, some with tails in their ears, others with too many legs. My own efforts were adjudged the best, which led Bill to express surprise that a man who couldn't draw anything at all with his eyes open should be able to draw a pig blindfold. Tired of this, Mac put on a pair of castanets and danced a Spanish fandango. He hung up a sheet in front of his studio lamp and performed an amazing series of shadow-pictures representing the "Hunting of the Snark." When our small visitors saw the Tub-Tub, "that terrible bird," flapping horribly about with his three-cornered eyes glaring at them, they grasped our hands and shouted with the most exquisite mingling of horror and delight. They were consoled with a wrestling match to which my versatile friend challenged himself. Having shaken hands with himself, he then grasped himself in the most approved catch-as-catch-can manner, struggled desperately to throw himself and