to goodness that you had taken this advice.

* * * * *

And you here too! Going to surprise your husband with a present again?
A copy of the Revised Version this time? Ah, that will give him a
chance to give you a surprise next Christmas--by reading it. Ah, you
should know Mrs. Boyzy, if you wish to know how to please your husband
at Christmas. For now thirty years that estimable woman has opened her
annual Christmas campaign on me as early as the month of October. With
affectionate strategy I am lured into book stores, and variety stores,
and china stores--last year she tolled me into a drug store--to discover
by artful references to this thing and that, what I fancy. Now, as a
matter of fact, having her, I fancy nothing else (I take it that the
newest married man could get off nothing prettier than that), but I
have become so used to the campaign, and also so unprincipled in my
advices to shorten it, that I profess the liveliest admiration over
about the second thing we come to. The result is that I often get
presents of a novel character. Last year I got a hand-painted coal
scuttle, and but a couple of Christmases before that, I had gotten a
gaudily framed picture of some retired saint, who had been martyred
and for all I know deservedly so. But the fashion of drug stores keeping
holiday presents, once came near exposing my whole plan of self defence.
My intense admiration of a handsomely ornamented cut glass bottle of
Unfailing Lotion for Neuralgia, which I thought she was pointing
out--when in fact she was trying to make me see a gorgeous dressing
case--excited a suspicion even in her unsuspecting mind. But if I
jest about this matter, it is not that I underestimate the sweetness
of the practice of married people remembering each other at Christmas.
I am not so sure that of all other gifts--not even excepting those to