VISCOUNTESS, AND OTHERS 



world ring with honest laughter and whose heroic death 

 brought many tears, at least to Villino Loki. He used 

 to call her "his little Lemur" because she had a way 

 of clinging to her mother, in her first debutante days. 

 Never was there a man so tender-hearted. On his 

 estate no wild thing was to be robbed of its life : not even 

 a rabbit. Loki's Grandmother used to be a little timid in 

 his company, because of this gift of swift humour. She 

 never felt able to meet him on his own ground except 

 once when in a windy June he told her that he had begun 

 to take his daily swim in the lake, and she shuddered at 

 the thought. 



"Cold!" he cried, "not a bit of it! Delightful! YOU 

 shall take a dip with me when next you come to us." 

 " No," she retorted -and it was the only time in all their 

 pleasant intercourse that she was ever brave enough to 

 make a pass with him" No, I had rather get into hot 

 water with you." 



Alas, alas ! That lake ! We felt the menace of it even then. 

 It was there, trying to save another, he found his death. 

 It has often been said that real wit is a thing of the past. 

 Certainly the younger generation's idea of pleasantry is a 

 kind of rough-and-tumble fight as compared to the neat, 

 delicate thrust-play of an older world. But this friend of 

 ours had a gift quite apart, a mixture of humour, wit and 

 satire, something dry, comic, quaint, peculiarly his own. 

 " It reminds me," said a clever relation of his once in our 

 hearing, " of an old wood carving." 

 We understood what he meant/ the odd angles, the sharp 

 turns, the simplicity, the brusque sincerity and withal 

 how richly genial ! 



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