THE LOW COST OF CABBING 42 THE GREAT MATCH BOX MYSTERY 45 ARE CATS PEOPLE? 51 MLLE. FAUTEUIL 56 MONEY AND FIREFLIES 60 CONCERNING THE TROUSER-CREASE 63 AN OLD-FASHIONED HEAVEN 68 ANOTHER LOST ART 71 MR. CHESTERTON AND THE SOLILOQUY 74 BUNK 77 THE COST OF A PYRAMID 82 WALTZING MICE AND DANCING MEN 87 THE HOBGOBLIN 92 THE VOICE OF THE PUSSY-WILLOW 96 PERNICIOUS PEACHES 99 SECOND CHILDHOOD’S HAPPY HOUR 105 PITY THE POOR GUEST OF HONOUR 109 A NEW MONROE DOCTRINE 114 DO CATS COME BACK? 117 THE RUTHLESSNESS OF MR. COBB 120 MY LAKE 123 THE HUNDREDTH AMENDMENT 134 SAY IT WITH ASTERISKS 144 NEITHER HERE NOR THERE [Illustration] THE SECRET Eve was bored. She confided the fact to the Serpent. “Tell me something new!” she wailed, and the Serpent—he had never seen a lady cry before—was deeply moved (the Serpent has always been misjudged) and—there being no National Board of Censors—told her everything he knew. When he had finished, Eve yawned and looked boreder than ever. “Is _that_ all?” she said. The Dramatic Critic asks the same question on the first night of a new Play—“Will there never be an end to these Dormitory Farces,” he moans, pondering darkly the while how he may transmute its leaden dullness to the precious gold of a scintillating paragraph. Father Time has nothing to say on the matter. If you ask him to show you a new thing, he shrugs his wings and growls, “You can search me.” Things old and things new are all alike to Father Time. Peradventure, in the uttermost recess of the Great Pyramid lies a hair of an unknown color, or a blueprint of the fourth dimension, or better still the ms. of a new play, or a joke that has never been cracked. When a Roman bath is unearthed in Kent or a milliner’s shop in Pompeii we wait breathless to hear of the discovery of a new story, or a new dress pattern, but always it is the same old skull, the same old amphora. Even the newness of Fashion is a jest of antiquity. In an Italian book printed in the sixteenth century is a story of a fool “who went about the streets naked, carrying a piece of cloth upon his shoulders. He was asked by some one why he did not dress himself, since he had the materials. ‘Because’ replied he, ‘I wait to see in what manner the fashions will end. I do not like to use my cloth for a dress which in a little time will be of no use to me, on account of some new fashion.’”