The usual questions were answered satisfactorily: but this time Hugh added one of his own invention-- `Does the cat scratch?'

The landlady looked round suspiciously, as if to make sure the cat was not listening. `I will not deceive you, gentlemen,' she said. `It do scratch, but not without you pulls its whiskers! It'll never do it,' she repeated slowly, with a visible effort to recall the exact words of some written agreement between herself and the cat, `without you pulls its whiskers!'

`Much may be excused in a cat so treated,' said Balbus, as they left the house and crossed to Number Seventy-three, leaving the landlady curtseying on the doorstep, and still murmuring to herself her parting words, as if they were a form of blessing, `--not without you pulls its whiskers!'

At Number Seventy-three they found only a small shy girl to show the house, who said `yes'm' in answer to all questions.

`The usual room,' said Balbus, as they marched in `the usual back-garden, the usual cabbages. I suppose you can't get them good at the shops?'

`Yes,'m,' said the girl.

`Well, you may tell your mistress we will take the room, and that her plan of growing her own cabbages is simply admirable!'

`Yes'm,' said the girl, as she showed them out.

`One day-room and three bedrooms,' said Balbus, as they returned to the hotel. `We will take as our day- room the one that gives us the least walking to do to get to it.'

`Must we walk from door to door, and count the steps?' said Lambert.

`No, no! Figure it out, my boys, figure it out!' Balbus gaily exclaimed, as he put pens, ink, and paper before his hapless pupils, and left the room.

`I say! It'll be a job!' said Hugh.

`Rather!' said Lambert.

`WELL, they call me so because I am a little mad, I suppose,' she said, good-humouredly, in answer to Clara's cautiously worded question as to how she came by so strange a nickname. `You see, I never do what sane people are expected to do nowadays. I never wear long trains (talking of trains, that's the Charing Cross Metropolitan Station--I've something to tell you about that), and I never play lawn-tennis. I ca'n't cook an omelette. I ca'n't even set a broken limb! There's an ignoramus for you!'

Clara was her niece, and full twenty years her junior; in fact, she was still attending a High School--an institution on which Mad Mathesis spoke with undisguised aversion. `Let a woman be meek and lowly!' she would say. `None of your High Schools for me!' But it was vacation-time just now, and Clara was her guest, and Mad Mathesis was showing her the sights of that Eighth Wonder of the world--London.

`The Charing Cross Metropolitan Station!' she resumed, waving her hand towards the entrance as if she were introducing her niece to a friend. `The Bayswater and Birmingham Extension is just completed,