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September 9, 1914.] as a camera?" he said. "Its needs are, I consider, even greater. Presumably this gift is meant to facilitate my smoking, but an empty cigarette-case offers me nothing to smoke—it implies the heavy responsibility on an already overburdened man of keeping it filled. Now, suppose you complete the gift, as I did Jane's, by at least a year's endowment?"

I began to wish that the cigarette-cases had perished, but after his kindness to Jane I could hardly refuse.

"Well, what would it cost?" I said. "That's easily reckoned," said Jane's uncle. "Say I smoke on an average fifteen cigarettes a day—that 's 105 a week—that's Have you a piece of paper?"

It worked out at just under 5,500 cigarettes a year. At 8s. a hundred, twenty guineas would just cover the year's endowment. It seemed out of all proportion to the cost of the case.

"It's a good deal more than Jane's camera got," I protested.

"I told you its claims were greater. Of course you can't expect to get off as cheaply with a fixed habit of maturity as with the passing caprice of a kid. On the other hand you might have done worse. Suppose you had given me golf-clubs—there'd have been golf-balls, caddies, club subscription, lunches, fares and postage on correspondence with The Times. Compared with that, what is a paltry five guineas a quarter?"

On reflection I found that very few presents would have escaped the endowment scheme altogether, and that the cigarette-case was really a comparatively modest pensioner, and I felt a little comforted.

For four quarters I remitted five guineas to Jane's uncle.

My present seemed to change his nature. Whereas he had been a man rather to ignore the claims of clothes than to consider them, I now noticed that he looked more prosperous and was better dressed than I had ever seen him before. Once, when he appeared in a new lounge suit—the second new one within my knowledge in six months—I could not refrain from remarking on it.

"One has to dress up to a silver cigarette-case, old fellow," he said, and the subject was dismissed.

The year was on the point of expiring. One day I way talking with Jane's uncle and another man at the Club. The other man offered me a cigarette, and to my amazement passed uncle over with these words:—

"No good offering you one, I know, poor old chap. When is your doctor going to give you a reprieve?"

"I don't know," he said sadly, taking a pinch of snuff.

"What does this mean?" I said when we were alone. "What about the endowment at the rate of fifteen cigarettes a day?"

"A parallel case to Jane's," he answered. "There seems something fatal about these endowments. Three days after you bad agreed to endow the cigarette-case my doctor forbade me, on pain of some awful 'itis,' to exceed three cigarettes a day. With the first instalment you had provided me with cigarettes for the year. So what should I do in these circumstances but follow the precedent set by your family? Only, instead of a dormouse and a stamp-album, I chose to purchase smartness. I spent the three remaining instalments on my wardrobe."

It was my birthday yesterday. Jane's uncle sent me a handsome silver-mounted walking-stick. "It is the only thing I can think of that requires no endowment," he wrote. "Pavements are supplied by the County Council, I and you have an umbrella-stand."

I should like to use it across his back.



First Lady.

Second Lady.