Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 2).djvu/324

 his lofty chair, and apparently pining for his feeding-bottle, the University student who knew a thing or two!

He is not filled with horror and aversion now at the mention of contaminating things; bland innocence fills the air around him, and he is unconscious of the existence of good and evil. His toys are laid out on the little desk in front of him—his pen, his ink, and his paper. Near him sits his nurse, the clerk; and all around are counsel, witnesses, jurymen, in attendance there solely to answer the artless questions which fall from his little rosy lips. It is an infant school—an idyll: it is sweetly pretty.

"And what do people do with cards?" asks his lordship.

"They play with them, ducky," replies Bulliwrag, Q.C.

"Play with them?" repeats his lordship, beginning to get restless, and rubbing his eyes ominously. "I want to get down and play. Isn't it lunch time?"

And the clerk hastily gets up, and hoists up his lordship just as he is slipping out of his chair, and pats him soothingly; but he won't sit up and listen any more, and he won't understand what a card is, and he pouts until the barristers stop their ears in anxious anticipation; and the usher takes up his lordship, and dances him up and down, and hurries him away to his private room and his bottle of dry sherry.

Can we have dreamed that we once encountered in a railway carriage an elderly gentleman of overwhelmingly innocent mien? There he seemed to sit, sucking his umbrella handle, and, as we entered the compartment, he gazed at us with round eyes full of innocent delight, and crowed.

"Fine day for the Ascot Cup," we remarked; and he took the handle from his mouth—leaving a little dewy drip on his chubby chin—and said, "Astot tup?"

We explained, in language as simple as possible, the nature of the Ascot Cup contest; but his round blue eyes were full of puzzled wonder, and he loudly crowed again. Then we tried the Labour Commission, the short service system, and the bearings of the Jackson case on the future relations of husband and wife. Here he crowed loudly, rammed both his thumbs into his mouth, and said: "Baby tinks yat 'ee decision in that case was as intrinsically bad in law as it was distinctly and perniciously opposed to those legal traditions which, though finding their basis in no legislative enactment, should, as nurturing the very root of all true social well-being, and forming, as they unquestionably do, the substructure of that order to which society owes its very essence and being—ahem!"

He stopped abruptly in confusion; but instantly perceiving that he had gone too