MEETING THE COUNTESS.
"Could you find time to meet the Countess of Aire?" inquired the Vicar's wife with her gracious smile, after we had chanced together at a corner of our village street. "At five o'clock," she added, "at the cross-roads."
"I shall be charmed," said I. "But what a funny meeting-place."
"It seems to me very natural," said the Vicar's wife.
"Is there going to be speech-making?" I asked.
"How absurd!" she answered. "But of course there will be a discussion."
"Who else will be present?" I asked.
"No one," she said.
I was never so puzzled in my life.
"It really seems rather odd," said I, "that we should meet alone at the cross-roads. And it seems so romantic too. At five o'clock, you said? I always think that is such a sentimental hour."
A bewildered look now crept into the Vicar's wife's face.
"Are you joking or serious?" she said. "Perhaps I have not made myself clear. I am simply asking if you could kindly meet the Countess of Aire in place of the Vicar."
"And I say I shall be charmed," I repeated; "and I think the prospect is most alluring, and I shall endeavour to do the occasion all honour. I shall put on my best mustard-coloured suit and my new green Tyrolean hat—the one with the feather in it."
"I don't see why you should, simply to meet the Countess of Aire."
"But think of the romance of the meeting," I urged. "Just fancy! It is to be at the cross-roads, perhaps above the nameless grave of a suicide. There I shall be waiting at five o'clock, all dressed up in my mustard suit and tremulous with excitement. And at last there will dash up to the trysting-place some splendid equipage, a silver-plated car, or the family coach with prancing and foaming horses. And there, at the cross-roads, we shall have our little discussion; no speech-making, all quite informal. Oh, I wish it could have been moonlight!"
The Vicar's wife began to look quite scared.
"Are you going mad?" she asked.
"I think so," I said. "Do you know," I went on wildly, saying just anything by way of preserving my sanity, "I remember that once, when I was quite little, I half promised I would marry this highly exalted person; we were playing together as boy and girl in a garden."
"But the Countess of Aire," cried the Vicar's wife, "never was a girl."
"And never was a boy either," I cried.
"The Countess of Aire," screamed the Vicar's wife—yes, she was fairly screaming by now—"is a he."
"Now that is absurd," I said.
It was the Vicar, coming round the corner in his usual hurry, as if every day were a Sunday, who saved the situation by bumping into us both.
"The Countess of Aire," shrieked his poor wife, frantically clutching him by the coat-tails, "is a man, isn't he?"
"Certainly," said the Vicar. "It is a terrible age, but thank Heaven for this," he added piously, "we have yet to learn of a female County Surveyor."
"Nursery Governess Wanted. Three children, 7, 6, and 2 ears."
—Daily Paper.
Plenty of stuff to box.
