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38 that the cartridges had been carefully sterilised, but glueing his courage to the sticky point, he said, "Be it so, you bloodthirsty little beggarand may your gore be on your own knob!"

"It is always barely possible," retorted Mr Bhosh, "that we may both miss the target!" And he made a secret motion to Mr Bodgers with his superior eyeshutter, intimating that he was to remember to omit the bullets.

But lackadaisy! as Poet Burns sings, the best-laid schemes both of men and in the mouse department are liable to gang aftand so it was in the present instance, for Duchess Dickinson intercepted Chunder Bindabun's wink and, with the diabolical intuition of a feminine, divined the presence of a rather suspicious rat. Accordingly, on the diaphanous pretext that Mr Bodgers was looking faintish and callow, she insisted on applying a very large smelling-jar to his nasal organ.

Whether the vessel was charged with salts of superhuman potency, or some narcotic drug,