"We shall have _our_ little bust by and by, I suppose," said RAGGIE, pensively. "I wonder _when_. I feel in the mood to sally forth and paint the night with strange scarlet, slashed with silver and gold, while our young votaries--beautiful pink boys in paper hats--let off marvellous pale epigrammatic crackers and purple paradoxical squibs in our honour." "See, RAGGIE, here come our youthful disciples! Do they not look deliciously innocent and enthusiastic? I wish, though, we could contrive to imbue them with something of our own lovely limpness--they are so atrociously lively and active." "That will come, FUSTIAN," said Lord RAGGIE, indulgently. "We must give them time. Already they have copied our distinctive costume, caught our very features and colouring. Some day, FUSTIAN, some day they will adopt our mystic emblem--the symbol that is such a true symbol in possessing no meaning whatever--the Magenta Cauliflower! And then--and then----." "----It will be time for Us to drop it," continued Mr. FUSTIAN FLITTERS, with his peculiar smile of inscrutable obviousness. "Beautiful rose-coloured children!" murmured Lord RAGGIE, dreamily; "how sad to think that they will all grow up and degenerate into pork-butchers, and generals, and bishops, and absurdly futile persons of that sort! But listen; it is so sweet of them--they are going to sing an exquisite little catch I composed expressly for them, a sort of mellifluously raucous chant with no tune in particular. That is where it is so wonderful. True melody is always quite tuneless!" One by one the shrill, passionate young voices chimed in, until the very lamp-posts throbbed and rang with the words, and they seemed to wander away, away among the sleeping pageant of the chimney-pots, away to the burnished golden globes of the struggling pawnbroker. "Please ter remember. The Fifth o' November. For Gun Powder Plot. Ter blow up the King and 'is Porliment. Shall never. Be. Forgot! 'Oller, Boys, 'Oller!" Lord RAGGIE, with his head bent, listened with a smile parting the scarlet thread of his lips, a smile in his pretty hollow eyes. "I wonder why people should be exhorted to remember such a prosaic and commonplace crime as that," he meditated aloud: "a crime, too, that had not even the vulgar merit of being a success!" "Only failures ever _do_ succeed, really," said FUSTIAN, leaning largely over his barrow. "How deliciously they are joggling us! Don't you like having your innermost shavings stimulated, RAGGIE?"