Somewhere towards the end of _The Tragedy of an Indiscretion_ (LANE), we arrive at the Court of Criminal Appeal, where, in the course of unravelling the plot, one of the judges is moved to exclaim, "This is the most hopelessly complicated story I ever had the pain of listening to!" His lordship certainly has my sympathy. Personally speaking, the first twenty pages of it nearly gave me a nervous breakdown, so wild and whirling were the events into which it plunged. Let me start the thing for you. _Ronald Warrington_, who was heir to the aged _Duke of Glenstaffen_, eloped with _Mrs. Greville_, assuming for no very understandable reason the name of his friend and secretary, _Essendine_. So, the pair being established at an hotel, the supposed _Mr. E._ goes to a station to buy an evening paper, is fallen upon by the real one, and thrust into a train to attend the deathbed of his ducal relative. _Essendine_ himself, entering the hotel to explain matters to the lady, finds (1) that she is the wife who divorced him before marrying _Greville_; (2) that she has just died of heart disease. Next, being of a placidity almost inhuman, he decides to bury the corpse as that of his wife, and not worry anyone with explanations. What he didn't know then, or I either, was that another lady was at the moment gadding about London in one of _Mrs. Greville's_ cast-off frocks, and pretending to be that much-married female. And when in due course she is murdered, and the strangely apathetic widower, _Mr. Greville_, who never set eyes upon her, is arrested for the crime--well, you may begin to think that the judge's remark was an understatement. What I should like to ask Mr. J. W. BRODIE-INNES is, if this is his notion of an "indiscretion," what would he have to say of a real social error? * * * * * AT THE MUSEUM. [Illustration: _Soldier (on leave from the trenches visiting the sights of London--before enlarged model of common flea)._ "Yes, that's it, father! That's the kind I was tellin' you about. But it ain't much of a specimen."] * * * * *