Sudden and grewsome pause. The splashing ceased. The singer could hardly have been drowned in a hip bath, but Mr. Garnet hoped for the best.

His hopes were shattered.

"Come," resumed the young gentleman persuasively, "into the garden, Maud, for ther black batter nah-eet hath—er—florn."[7]

[7]

Jerry Garnet sprang from his seat and paced the room.

"This is getting perfectly impossible," he said to himself. "I must get out of this. A fellow can't work in London. I'll go down to some farmhouse in the country. I can't think here. You might just as well try to work at a musical 'At Home.'"

Here followed certain remarks about the young man upstairs, who was now, in lighter vein, putting in a spell at a popular melody from the Gaiety Theater.

He resumed his seat and set himself resolutely to hammer out something which, though it might not be literature, would at least be capable of being printed. A search through his commonplace book brought no balm. A commonplace book is the author's rag bag. In it he places all the insane ideas that come to him, in the groundless hope that some day he will be able to convert[8] them with magic touch into marketable plots.

[8]

This was the luminous item which first met Mr. Garnet's eye:

Mem. Dead body found in railway carriage under seat. Only one living occupant of carriage. He is suspected of being the murderer, but proves that he only entered carriage at twelve o'clock in the morning, while the body has been dead since the previous night.

To this bright scheme were appended the words:

This will want some working up.

J. G.

"It will," thought Jerry Garnet grimly, "but it will have to go on wanting as far as I'm concerned."

The next entry he found was a perfectly inscrutable lyric outburst.[9]

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