“Swearin'! 'E! Why, 'e don't know any.”      

       “Thank you,” said Mrs. Korner. “That will do, Harriet; you may go.”      

       Mrs Korner put down the teapot with a bang. “The very girl,” said Mrs. Korner bitterly, “the very girl despises him.”      

       “Perhaps,” suggested Miss Greene, “he had been swearing and had finished.”      

       But Mrs. Korner was not to be comforted. “Finished! Any other man would have been swearing all the time.”      

       “Perhaps,” suggested the kindly bosom friend, ever the one to plead the cause of the transgressor, “perhaps he was swearing, and she did not hear him. You see, if he had his head well underneath the bed—”      

       The door opened.     

       “Sorry I am late,” said Mr. Korner, bursting cheerfully into the room. It was a point with Mr. Korner always to be cheerful in the morning. “Greet the day with a smile and it will leave you with a blessing,” was the motto Mrs. Korner, this day a married woman of six months and three weeks standing had heard her husband murmur before getting out of bed on precisely two hundred and two occasions. The Motto entered largely into the scheme of Mr. Korner's life. Written in fine copperplate upon cards all of the same size, a choice selection counselled him each morning from the rim of his shaving-glass.     

       “Did you find it?” asked Mrs. Korner.     

       “It is most extraordinary,” replied Mr. Korner, as he seated himself at the breakfast-table. “I saw it go under the bed with my own eyes. Perhaps—”      

       “Don't ask me to look for it,” interrupted Mrs. Korner. “Crawling about on their hands and knees, knocking their heads against iron bedsteads, would be enough to make some people swear.” The emphasis was on the “some.”      

       “It is not bad training for the character,” hinted Mr. Korner,       “occasionally to force oneself to perform patiently tasks calculated—”      

       “If you get tied up in one of those long 

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