THE GAME OF CHRISTMAS CARDS.--That Father Christmas is coming to town with his usual entertainment is evident from the cards and advertisements sent everywhere in advance. What is the impossible future of the Christmas card? This is a question suggested by the modern way of looking at things, and especially at the marvellous ingenuity with which RAPHAEL TUCK AND SON have saved their cards from dwindling into the obscurity of dull _averageness_. They are in their pristine freshness scintillating with that adhesive frost on simple summer flowers so entirely metaphorical of the season. Their dainty, artistic, and useful calendars inspire one with a cheerful fascination to begin the New Year. * * * * * MORE SHE-NOTES. (_By_ IÕPNA, _Author of "A Yellow Plaster."_) CHAPTER III. Colour-blind from his tenth year, CHAMOIS HYDE (late of Christ's, Oxford, not to be confused with Christchurch, Cambridge), had hitherto ignored details of scenery; but now the vermiliony petal of the pimpernel, the rubicund radix of the carrot, the blue of the insensate bottle-fly--these reminded him respectively of the cheeks of MARGERINE, her hair, the spots in her grey eyes where, as we said, the soul looked through. The harvest-sheaves again were, broadly speaking, her figure. [Illustration] Till now he had been impervious to the new femalehood, rising like Proteus from the azure foam; dumbly he had waited for a woman with possible potentialities, or, failing this, with potential possibilities. MARGERINE, whom we left a fortnight ago inarticulately gurgling by the trout-stream, caught the note of a step in the briar-patch. With her budding instinct she could tell her lover's footfall half a mile away, waking the age-echo in her chest. This one was lighter and less gregarious. In her sphinxy way she divined that it belonged to a woman with Puritan impossibilities and a yellow plaster next her heart. Under a mask of habitual and hereditary reticence, the step came on, revealing a finished creature, gowned beyond all mending. MARGERINE, whose face was her ewe-lamb, became sub-acutely aware of her own half-made frock, and yearned a little in the other's direction. "Oh!" she said; "how _did_ you get it built that way? I mean the gown." The woman's voice came through the envelope of MARGERINE'S sub-consciousness, steely clear as a cheese-cutter. "My name is Mrs. CHAMOIS HYDE. In other words, I am the wife of Mr. CHAMOIS HYDE!" "The wife of CHAMOIS HYDE?" said the innocent girl; "I do not follow you." "Let me explain," said the other, unsparingly. "CHAMOIS HYDE, who is now due at your trout-stream" (MARGARINE smiled stoopingly), "is my husband. I say, he married me. Once I had a maiden name. That is all past. I changed it when I married. All _honourable_ women do. _I_ am honourable. _I_ changed mine. Now I am Mrs. CHAMOIS HYDE. See?"