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THE GOLDEN AGE to grace the feast, and was lopping demurely about the grass, selecting the juiciest plantains; while Selina, as the eldest lady present, was toying, in her affected feminine way, with the first full tumbler, daintily fishing for bits of broken cork.

'Hurry up, can't you?' growled our host; 'what are you girls always so beastly particular for?'

'Martha says,' explained Harold (thirsty too, but still just), 'that if you swallow a bit of cork, it swells, and it swells, and it swells inside you, till you——'

'O bosh!' said Edward, draining the glass with a fine pretence of indifference to consequences, but all the same (as I noticed) dodging the floating cork-fragments with skill and judgment.

'O, it's all very well to say bosh,' replied Harold nettled: 'but every one knows it's true but you. Why, when Uncle Thomas was here last, and they got up a bottle of wine for him, he took just one tiny sip out of his glass, and then he said, "Poo, my goodness, that's 134