Mrs. Duckie's family consists of three children and a husband. They are quite prosperous, for two of the children, now grown up, keep themselves, and Mr. Duckie does well enough as head waiter in a Fleet Street chop house of the old type. The eldest son indeed more than keeps himself, for he has latterly become a celebrity and earns the income of at least an Under Secretary--almost that of the President of the Local Government Board, to whom I have no doubt he has in his time made many successful sarcastic allusions. For Herbert Duckie (to give him his baptismal name) is a music-hall singer. The mild syllables uttered over the child by the curate at the font some five-and-twenty years ago are, however, unknown to London, on whose placards Herbert Duckie figures more provocatively as Alf Pinto. Of this pseudonym his mother is rightly proud, for there is more in it than meets the casual eye. Much thought went to its architecture, Alf standing not only for an abbreviation of Alfred, but signifying also a moiety, and Pinto being pronounced humorously by the initiate with the "i" long--thus convivially suggesting a measure of the national beverage. The joke is not original, I fear, for I remember it in a delightful travesty of poor Ouida; but it seems to have been genuinely evolved afresh by young Duckie and his friends. His father and mother are naturally proud of him, for in addition to his fame and his considerable salary, he has the kindly filial habit of driving up to the house on fine Sunday afternoons in a dogcart and taking some of the family noticeably in it to Epping, or the Welsh Harp, or Richmond. Mrs. Duckie's attitude to her gifted son is reverential and wondering. She is proud of his shining gifts and success, and perplexed at his possession of them; although, as she says, it comes from her side, grandfather being that musical, and her Uncle Will a terrible one to notice and make jokes. How true it is that honour can come from our friends quite as much as from our personal attainments--often, perhaps, more. Dollie Heathcote, I feel sure, has hitherto looked upon me as a harmless old buffer, hopelessly out of date, but amiable enough, and possibly a person to be conciliated in view of my kinship with his chosen family. But when one evening at dinner I asked him casually if he knew Alf Pinto, respect for me began to grow, and when I went on to say that I had met Alf Pinto and conversed with him, he was at my feet. "Not _the_ Alf Pinto?" he said. "Not the man who sings 'He isn't so pleased as he was'?" "The same," I said. He asked me feverishly how I knew him, but I am not quite so green as that. If I told Dollie that Alf Pinto was my landlady's son, all, or nearly all, the gilt would be off the gingerbread. So I made a mystery of it, and the young gentleman went off to a dance baffled but still reverent.