somebody to sit alongside of him while he pulls away on his old briarwood pipe, holding his tired little paddy in her soft right hand, while she twitters forth George Ade's latest Fable on 'The Flipper that Flapped', or something else equally diverting. The reverse of the picture is equally true. If there is anything in the world that drives a man to despair it is to have to listen to five o'clock tea gabble when he happens to be in a mood for the Alexander Hamilton, or Vice-President Marshall style of discourse. The facts are the same in both cases. The Bernard Shaw lady is a delight to the heart and soul in his Bernard Shaw moods. The George Ade lady is a source of unalloyed bliss in a George Ade mood, but they don't reverse readily, and in most cases they can't reverse at all. Then there are other equally baffling complications along other lines. A man may be crazy about poetry, and he falls in love, as he supposes, with a dainty little creature in gold-rimmed eyeglasses, who writes the most exquisite lyrics, simply because he thinks at the moment that those lyrics are going to make his life just one sweet song after another. He marries the little songbird, and then what happens?" "Never having married a canary, I don't know," said the Landlady, with a glance at her husband. "Well, I'll tell you," said the Idiot. "He has a honeymoon of lovely images. He feels like a colt put out to pasture on the slopes of Parnassus. Life runs along with the lilt of a patter song--and then, to indulge in a joke worthy of the palmiest days of London Punch, he comes out of Patter-Song! There dawns a day when he is full chock-a-block up to his neck with poetry, and the inner man craves the re-enforcement of the kind of flapjacks his mother used to make. One good waffle would please him more than sixty-seven sonnets on the subject of 'Aspiration.' Nothing short of a lustrous, smoking, gleaming stack of fresh buckwheats can hold him on the pinnacle of joy, and the lovely little lyrist, to whom he has committed himself, his destinies, and all that he has under a vow for life, hies herself singing to the kitchen, mixes the necessary amount of concrete, serves the resulting dishes at the breakfast table, and gloom, gloom unmitigated, falls upon that house. After eating two of her cakes poor old hubby begins to feel as if he had swallowed the corner stone of a Carnegie library. That lyric touch that Herrick might have envied and Tennyson have viewed with professional alarm has produced a buckwheat cake of such impenetrable density that the Navy Department, if it only knew about it, would joyously grant her the contract for furnishing the armor plate for the new superdreadnoughts we are about to build so as to be prepared for Peace after Germany gets through with us. While eating those cakes the victim speculates on that old problem, Is Suicide a Sin? A cloud rises upon the horizon of his joy, and without intending any harm whatsoever, his mind