opinion."--_Daily Express_.

It is, of course, always the aggressive minority which really
represents the bulk of public opinion.

* * * * *

A BYGONE.

When I see the white-haired and venerable Thompson standing behind my
equally white-haired but much less venerable father at dinner, exuding
an atmosphere of worth and uprightness and checking by his mere silent
presence the more flippant tendencies of our conversation; when I hear
him whisper into my youthful son's ear, "Sherry, Sir?" in the voice of
a tolerant teetotaler who would not force his principles upon any man
but hopes sincerely that this one will say No; and when I am informed
that he promised our bootboy a rapid and inevitable descent to a state
of infamy and destitution upon discovering no more than the fag end of
a cigarette behind his ear, then I am tempted to recall an incident of
fifteen years back, lest it be forgotten that Thompson is a man like
ourselves who has known, and even owned, a human weakness.

Dinner had begun on that eventful evening at 7.30 P.M., and it was
drawing within sight of a conclusion, that is, the sweet had been
eaten and the savoury was overdue, at 9.45 P.M. Four of us had trailed
thus far through this critical meal: my father, a usually patient
widower who was becoming more than restless; the Robinsons, never a
jocund brace of guests, who were by now positively sullen, and myself
who, being but a boy--of twenty odd years and having little enough to
say to a woman of fifty-five and her still more antique husband, had