I have, of course, frequently seen many of the pictures that you mention, and have also read some of the stories of which, as you say, each illustration professes to tell one. I don't think however that I have seen the particular one of the signalman which you enclose; and it certainly seems a coincidence that he should be pressing his left hand so vehemently upon the precise spot at which your cook also is so apt to suffer pain. And it is odd too that, like her, he would appear to be so thoroughly respectable that their common affliction becomes a little difficult to understand. It is not, as you say, as if either of them gave one the least impression of being in any degree _loose_ or _rackety_. At the same time, from a close examination of the signalman's anatomy, I don't think that the organs so frequently mentioned in his very eloquent account of himself are those most likely to be affected. And perhaps your cook may also be happily under a similar misapprehension. And that is why, before taking the pills that have been so markedly blessed to the signalman, I would suggest the outward application of a little friction with the open palm of someone else's hand in which have been previously placed a few drops of turpentine. It will be so far less expensive, you see; and, even if not finally successful, will at any rate do no harm. But I have great hopes. Your affect. nephew, PETER HARDING. XXII _To Reginald Pole, S.Y. Nautilus, Harwich._ 91B HARLEY STREET, W., _August_ 30, 1910. MY DEAR REGGIE, When one of your youngest journalists from Franciscan House called upon me last night, I guessed at once that you were either away from home or that you had given the lad _carte blanche_ to collect material for a "silly season" discussion, without adding an Olympian hint or two as to where he had best go hunting. As a matter of fact both surmises turned out to be correct; and I even seemed to detect in him a certain air of relief as he admitted the first, while he was still young enough to feel rather important with regard to the second. Unhappy youth--how should he know that he had run into the very jaws of your arch-enemy? It was a college friendship with Horace, he informed me, that was his excuse for calling upon me, although of course he knew quite well that I was an eminent authority on the subject in hand. This was so obvious an afterthought that I couldn't help asking him what the subject might be. He told his lie so nicely, you see, and was so humbly aware of its small worth. He coloured a little. "Are we nervous?" he said. I pushed over the tobacco-jar, and asked him to fill his pipe. "I hope not," I replied, and he coloured a little more.