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Lady Carlotta stepped out on to the platform of the small wayside station and took a turn or two up and down its uninteresting length, to kill time till the train should be pleased to proceed on its way.

In a first-class carriage of a train speeding Balkanward across the flat, green Hungarian plain two Britons sat in friendly, fitful converse.

That was the time for the bright visionary Christmases which have long arisen from us to show faintly, after summer rain, in the palest edges of the rainbow!

He was dead--the head of a high tribunal, the upright magistrate whose irreproachable life was a proverb in all the courts of France.

Sir Lulworth Quayne was making a leisurely progress through the Zoological Society's Gardens in company with his nephew, recently returned from Mexico.

Once upon a time, a good many years ago, there was a traveller, and he set out upon a journey.

"All hunting stories are the same," said Clovis; "just as all Turf stories are the same, and all--"

The Baroness Gruebel shrugged her plump shoulders.

Treddleford sat in an easeful arm-chair in front of a slumberous fire, with a volume of verse in his hand and the comfortable consciousness that outside the club windows the rain was dripping and pattering with persistent purpose.

Then they set off, the little girl holding in her hand the small varnished rung of a crutch, just as she might walk beside her big friend and hold his thumb.

The war was over. The Germans occupied France. The whole country was pulsating like a conquered wrestler beneath the knee of his victorious opponent.

A man who could write anything cheerful after a day in the drafting-yards would be a freak of nature.