She was out on the back lawn this time hanging out the clothes. Some eccentric flannel garments flaunted defiance, with one leg in the air, and Mrs. Muff sang: “_At the sign of triumph Satan’s host doth flee----_” “Certainly it does,” I said to myself, and turning up my sleeves I walked out. “Mrs. Muff,” I began, “what is all this again about breakfast and soap?” Mrs. Muff in tears was worse than anything I had imagined to be possible. The only thought that enabled me to proceed was that Ruth in tears would be less harrowing but far more terrible. As usual, pity was conquered by fear, and I saw myself as an egg-thirsty tyrant standing (with Ruth behind me) belabouring the prostrate body of poor musical Mrs. Muff with a bar of Gossage’s Tallow Crown. Neither “Primrose Glory” (I think that was the name of her soap) nor fried fish were ever mentioned between us again. Ruth generously added half a cold pie to the peace contract, and I contributed a blue serge suit dear to James’s heart. It is always satisfactory to work in minor interests with great ones and to combine generosity with one’s own advantage. Imagination is sometimes thought to belong to a high order of intelligence. I believe it often depends upon absence of education. A great mind may so use its education that it only provides a wider field for the imagination, just as the marvellous digestion of a goat can adapt all sorts of inedible stuff to a useful end, but it is difficult to improve on the brilliant fancy of quite ordinary children and illiterate old ladies. If Mrs. Muff had had a normally adult intelligence or the least smattering of science, she would never have expected me to believe that the numerous handkerchiefs that got lost in the wash had gone down the grid. We lost six in one week and ten in the next, and still the water flowed peacefully away, nor ever tarried for a moment round Mrs. Muff’s ill-protected roots. I gave orders that if she would make such a mess she must stand on a foot-stool, which she reluctantly did; but if her explanation about the grid had contained a tenth part of fact she would have been standing knee-deep in a lake in no time. If Mrs. Muff had not been so deaf I should have told her some of the explanations that I have heard children give for natural phenomena, and asked whether they seemed to her at all remarkable. A nice child of my acquaintance, who invariably comes to dinner with dirty finger-nails, has given me quite a lot of imaginative pleasure. Once (she was reproved and sent back each time) it was the cold weather that had made them black; another day--the next, I believe--it was the thunder; the last time I went there to lunch it was because she had been hanging down her hands, and her mother commented upon the curious fact that the week before it had been because she was reaching up to do her hair. I myself have been told that the plates were sooty because