"Well, after the little blue hen had laid six beautiful cream-coloured eggs, she began to sit on them day after day, covering them with her feathers, and tucking her lovely little blue wings down around the edges of her nest to keep the eggs warm, and day after day she sat and dreamed of six darling little yellow, fluffy chickens with brown wings and sparkling black eyes and dear little peepy voices, and she was so happy in thinking of her little children that she was as patient as possible, and never seemed to care that all the other hens and chickens were running about in the warm yellow sunshine and snapping up lively little shiny bugs with their yellow beaks. "Well, after awhile, this dear little patient blue hen heard the funniest little tapping, tapping, tapping under her wings." Billy's eyes nearly bulged out of his head as he tapped the arm of the chair as I did. "And then she felt the most curious little fluttering under her wings--oh, Billy, _what_ do you think this little blue hen felt fluttering under her wings?" "A _omelette_!" said Billy, excitedly. I finished the Jimmies as an anticlimax. _Mr. and Mrs. Jimmie at Canterbury_. It did not disturb Jimmie the next day to discover that Canterbury Cathedral is _closed to visitors on Sunday_. _We_ saw it on Monday. After such a day it was no surprise to me to have Aubrey come home so dead tired that our strenuous evening was given up, and we all went out in Cary's new motor-car instead. CHAPTER XII A LETTER FROM JIMMIE Jimmie's "bread-and-butter" letter gave me such joy that I copy it here, which shows how little I care for the conventions of life, inasmuch as I reproduce none of the others. Lady Mary's, Mrs. Jimmie's, Artie Beg's, Cary's, Sir Wemyss's, Captain Featherstone's, were all models of propriety, and, except that they are friends of mine, I would add, of stupidity. Bee's--Bee's showed me a dozen ways in which I might have improved my hospitality, and hers, at least, does not come under the head of the name. But Jimmie's! Here it is: "Wretched creature and your wholly irreproachable husband: "Ordinarily I would simply write to say that I had had a bully good time at the iniquitous place where you hang out, and by so doing--were I an ordinary man--would consider that I had paid my just debts and was quits with the world--and with you. But not being ordinary--on the contrary, and without undue pride, denominating myself as a most extraordinary, rare, and orchid-like male creature, I feel that the appended narrative, albeit I do not figure therein as Sir Galahad or King Arthur, is no more than your just due. I relinquish the steel helmet and holy grail adjuncts, and exploit myself to your ribald gaze and half-witted laughter just as I is.