a well-directed missile touches a spring, one of the doors
opens, and an idiotic effigy comes blandly goggling and
sliding down an inclined plane, to be saluted with yells of
laughter, and ignominiously pushed back into domestic privacy.
Amidst surroundings thus happily suggesting the idyllic and
pastoral associations of Arcady, is an unpretending booth,
the placards on which announce it to be the temporary
resting-place of the "Far-famed Adepts of Thibet," who are
there for a much-needed change, after a "3500 years' residence
in the Desert of Gobi." There is also a solemn warning that
"it is impossible to spoof a Mahatma." In front of this booth,
a fair-headed, round-faced, and Spectacled Gentleman, in
evening clothes, and a particularly crumpled shirt-front--who
presents a sort of compromise between the Scientific Savant
and the German Waiter has just locked up his Assistant in
a wooden pillory, for no obvious reason except to attract
a crowd. The crowd collects accordingly, and includes a
Comic Coachman, who, with his Friend--a tall and speechless
nonentity--has evidently come out to enjoy himself_.

[Illustration: "I have here two ordinary clean clay pipes."]

_The Spectacled Gentleman_ (_letting the Assistant out of the
pillory, with the air of a man who does not often unbend to these
frivolities_). Now, Gentlemen, I am sure all those whom I see around
me have heard of those marvellous beings--the Mahatmas--and how they
can travel through space in astral bodies, and produce matter out of
nothing at all. (_Here the group endeavour to look as if these facts
were familiar to them from infancy, while the_ Comic Coachman _assumes
the intelligent interest of a Pantomime Clown in the price of a