It is because the heroine is really nice, I suppose, that she at last persuades him that she does love her husband and not him. Then he goes away, and she, sinking down on the _priedieu_, listens to the click of his polished heels on the marble floor of the church. She sees at her feet the flowers which he had worn in his button-hole, and she picks them up and kisses them passionately. She is going to hide them in her bosom: but then being really nice she lays them before the figure of the Virgin, with a little prayer and then goes away. As for the hero who is also the villain, he is piqued that it should be she that has stopped loving first; but is perhaps as well, he reflects, for she was beginning to bore him. He looks at his watch and jumps into a cab. The horse goes fast, for the hero has an engagement at half-past five o’clock with Therese and has offered the cabman fifty centimes _pour-boire_ if he will get to her house on time. “SANS WINS, SANS SONG, SANS SINGER, AND—SANS END.” I have another plot, but I do not expect ever to do anything with it. It is about the Man in the Iron Mask. Somebody is to be handling the iron mask—it is kept, I think, in the Invalides at Paris—when upon pressing a certain knob a hidden recess is to be revealed, constructed with marvelous ingenuity (as they always are you know) wherein is to be a paper telling all about the man in the iron mask. There is nothing very original so far; but as I recollect this plot—I thought of it four years ago—the denouement was very striking. Unfortunately I have forgotten it. KENNETH BROWN. SIDE TALKS WITH THE PHILISTINES: BEING SOUL EASEMENT AND WISDOM INCIDENTALLY. Subscribers to the PHILISTINE not fully understanding my jokes will be supplied with laughing gas at club rates. * * * * * _The St. Louis Mirror_ is flashing the light on to one W. J. Arkell, who it says has a habit of carrying on a brilliant conversazione with himself through his chapeau. Just what this means I do not know, but Arkell is not the only man in this country who owns an Unjust Judge. * * * * *