Suggest you remind telegraph clerk on duty
at this hour at this post-office that she perhaps
talks a shade too much about Herne Bay
and gives public too little consideration.
The girl, having ceased her chatter, took the telegram and began feverishly to count the words. Then her tapping pencil slowed down and her brows contracted; she was assimilating their meaning. Then, with a blush, and a very becoming one, she looked at me with an expression of distress and said, "Do you really want this to go?"
"No," I said, withdrawing the money.
"I'm sorry I was not more attentive," she said.
"That's all right," I replied. "Tear it up."
And I came away, feeling, with a certain glow of satisfaction not unmixed with self-righteousness, that I had done something to raise the post-office standard and to ensure better attention. But the joke is that, if I had myself received better attention, I should have lost thirty pounds, for St. Vitus was unplaced. This story must therefore remain without a moral.
E.V.L.