Many years ago, they tell me, there _was_ a butcher in Bond Street. Perhaps you dealt there. For my part I was not eating much meat in those days. But I can imagine his window--a perfect little grotto of jasper and onyx, with stalactites of pure gold, and in the middle, resting on a genuine block of Arctic ice, an exquisite beef-sausage. I wish he would come back. It is difficult to realise that there is anything but shop-windows in Bond Street, but I like to think that, up there in those upper storeys which one never sees, there does dwell a self-contained little community to whom Bond Street is merely the village street, down which the housewives pass gossiping each morning to the greengrocer's or the fishmonger's and never purchase any pearls at all. When the butcher comes back I think I shall join them. A. P. H. * * * * * [Illustration: _Father_. "LOOK HERE, BILLY, MR. SMITH CALLED AT THE OFFICE THIS MORNING ABOUT YOUR FIGHT WITH HIS BOY YESTERDAY." _Son_. "DID HE? I HOPE YOU GOT ON AS WELL AS I DID."] * * * * * [Illustration: _Joan_ (_whose mother has just bought her a pair of woollen gloves_). "OH, MUMMY, I WISH YOU HAD GOT KID. I HATE THIS KIND; THEY MAKE MY SWEETS SO HAIRY."] * * * * * THE SAD CASE OF EL GRECO. It was at the National Gallery, situated on the north side of Trafalgar Square, that I first made the acquaintance of one DOMENICO THEOTOCOPULI, a native of Crete, who--probably because his own people wanted him to be a stockbroker or something--set up as a painter in Spain, and was dubbed by the Dons "El Greco," as you might say "Scottie." For years I have been rather tickled by his manner of depicting Popes and Saints as if they were reflected in elongating mirrors labelled, "Before Dining at the Toreador Restaurant." But until quite lately I hardly ever met anyone who had even noticed him, so I felt quite bucked on the old chap's account when I heard that he was considered one of the most distinguished of the Spanish painters, past and present, who are on view just now at Burlington House. And what surprises me is not that old THEOTOCOPULI should attract so much attention in Piccadilly, but that such lots of people seem never to have known that he has been exhibiting himself all this time in Trafalgar Square. I'm sure Mrs. Bletherwood didn't, for one, when she tackled me at the Chattertons' the other afternoon. "Of course you've been to Burlington House?" she began, and she was in such a hurry to get first innings that she didn't give me time to say that I hadn't yet, but that I meant to go on my first free day that wasn't foggy.