capacious and over-furnished mouth.

"Booful," murmured Damocles. "I shall go shooting tigerth to-mowwow.
Shoot vem in ve mouth, down ve froat, so as not to spoil ve wool."

Turning over the page, the Major disclosed a most grievous grizzly
bear, grizzly and bearish beyond conception, heraldic, regardant,
expectant, not collared, fanged and clawed proper, rampant, erect,
requiring no supporters.

"You could thtab him wiv a thword if you were quick, while he was
doing that," opined Damocles, charmed, enraptured, delighted. One by
one, other savage, fearsome beasts were disclosed to the increasingly
delighted boy until, without warning, the Major suddenly turned a page
and disclosed a brilliant and hungry-looking snake.

With a piercing shriek the boy leapt convulsively from Nurse Beaton's
arms, rushed blindly into the wall and endeavoured to butt and bore
his way through it with his head, screaming like a wounded horse. As
the man and woman sprang to him he shrieked, "It'th under my foot!
It'th moving, moving, moving _out_" and fell to the ground in a fit.

Major John Decies arose from his bachelor dinner-table that evening,
lit his "planter" cheroot, and strolled into the verandah that looked
across a desert to a mountain range.

Dropping into a long low chair, he raised his feet on to the long
leg-rest extensions of its arms, and, as he settled down and waited
for coffee, wondered why no such chairs are known in the West; why the
trunks of the palms looked less flat in the moonlight than in the