From R. Holmes & Co., by John Kendrick Bangs

***

the lemon curl giving it the vertebrate appearance that all stiff drinks should have

***

I smiled broadly, and slapped the breakfast-table so hard in my satisfaction that even the shredded-wheat biscuits flew up into the air and caught in the chandelier.

***

Breakfast over, I went to my desk to put the finishing touches to a novel I had written the week before, when word came up on the telephone from below that a gentleman from /Busybody's Magazine/ wished to see me on an important matter of business.

"Tell him I'm already a subscriber," I called down, supposing the visitor to be merely an agent. "I took the magazine, and a set of Chaucer in a revolving bookcase, from one of their agents last month and have paid my dollar."

***

"'Now, Mrs. Burlingame,' said I, 'that leaves four persons still in the ring—yourself, your husband, your daughter, and the Duke of Snarleyow, your daughter's newly acquired fiancé, in whose honor the dinner was given.

***

"Aha!" said I. "That's the milk in the cocoanut, is it?

***

"If it were not for her pearl rope, Mrs. Wilbraham Ward-Smythe could go anywhere she pleased without attracting any more attention from me than a passing motor-car.

***

"Aha!" said I. "And you think—"

"I don't think, Jenkins, until the time comes. Gray matter is scarce these times, and I'm not wasting any of mine on unnecessary speculation," said Raffles Holmes.

***

"Keep up the talk, Jenkins," he said. "The walls are thin here, and it's just as well, in matters of this sort, that our neighbors should have the impression that I have not gone out. I've filled the machine up with a choice lot of songs and small-talk to take care of my end of it. A consolidated gas company, like yourself, should have no difficulty in filling in the gaps."

***

There was the Honorable Poultry Tickletoe, the historian, whose articles on the shoddy quality of the modern Panama hat have created such a stir throughout the hat trade; Mr. William Darlington Ponkapog, the poet, whose epic on the "Reign of Gold" is one of the longest, and some writers say the thickest, in the English language; James Whistleton Potts, the eminent portraitist, whose limnings of his patients have won him a high place among the caricaturists of the age, Robert Dozyphrase, the expatriated American novelist, now of London, whose latest volume of sketches, entitled /Intricacies/, has been equally the delight of his followers and the despair of students of the occult....

***

"What are you going to do now?" I asked. "Write to Bruce and tell him the facts?"

Holmes's answer was a glance.

"Oh cream-cakes!" he ejaculated, with profane emphasis.