elephant on your croquet-lawn; but he was shy and diffident
with women.  I told my mother privately that he was an
absolute woman-hater; so, of course, she laid herself out to
flirt all she knew, which isn't a little.''

  ``And was the gentleman responsive?''

  ``I hear he told some one at the club that he was looking
out for a Colonial job, with plenty of hard work, for a
young friend of his, so I gather that he has some idea of
marrying into the family.''

  ``You seem destined to be the victim of the reformation,
after all.''

  Clovis wiped the trace of Turkish coffee and the beginnings
of a smile from his lips, and slowly lowered his dexter
eyelid.  Which, being interpreted, probably meant, ``I don't
think!''

			 TOBERMORY

  It was a chill, rain-washed afternoon of a late August
day, that indefinite season when partridges are still in
security or cold storage, and there is nothing to
hunt---unless one is bounded on the north by the Bristol
Channel, in which case one may lawfully gallop after fat red
stags.  Lady Blemley's house-party was not bounded on the
north by the Bristol Channel, hence there was a full
gathering of her guests round the tea-table on this
particular afternoon.  And, in spite of the blankness of the
season and the triteness of the occasion, there was no trace
in the company of that fatigued restlessness which means a
dread of the pianola and a subdued hankering for auction
bridge.  The undisguised open-mouthed attention of the
entire party was fixed on the homely negative personality of
Mr. Cornelius Appin.  Of all her guests, he was the one who
had come to Lady Blemley with the vaguest reputation.  Some
one had said he was ``clever,'' and he had got his
invitation in the moderate expectation, on the part of his
hostess, that some portion at least of his cleverness would
be contributed to the general entertainment.  Until tea-time
that day she had been unable to discover in what direction,
if any, his cleverness lay.  He was neither a wit nor a
croquet champion, a hypnotic force nor a begetter of amateur
theatricals.  Neither did his exterior suggest the sort of
man in whom women are willing to pardon a generous measure
of mental deficiency.  He had subsided into mere Mr.  Appin,
and the Cornelius seemed a piece of transparent baptismal
bluff.  And now he was claiming to have launched on the
world a discovery beside which the invention of gunpowder,
of the printing-press, and of steam locomotion were
inconsiderable trifles.  Science had made bewildering
strides in many directions during recent decades, but this
thing seemed to belong to the domain of miracle rather than
to scientific achievement.

  ``And do you really ask us to believe,'' Sir Wilfrid was
saying, ``that you have discovered a means for instructing
animals in the art of human speech, and that dear old
Tobermory has proved your first successful pupil?''

  ``It is a problem at which I have worked for the last
seventeen years,'' said Mr. Appin, ``but only during the
last eight or nine months have I been rewarded with
glimmerings of success.  Of course I have experimented with
thousands of animals, but latterly only with cats, those
wonderful creatures which have assimilated themselves so
marvellously with our civilization while retaining all their
highly developed feral instincts.  Here and there among cats
one comes across an outstanding superior intellect, just as
one does among the ruck of human beings, and when I made the
acquaintance of Tobermory a week ago I saw at once that I
was in contact with a `Beyond-cat' of extraordinary
intelligence.  I had gone far along the road to success in
recent experiments; with Tobermory, as you call him, I have
reached the goal.''

  Mr. Appin concluded his remarkable statement in a voice
which he strove to divest of a triumphant inflection.  No
one said ``Rats,'' though Clovis's lips moved in a
monosyllabic contortion which probably invoked those rodents
of disbelief.

  ``And do you mean to say,'' asked Miss Resker, after a
slight pause, ``that you have taught Tobermory to say and
understand easy sentences of one syllable?''

  ``My dear Miss Resker,'' said the wonder-worker patiently,
``one teaches little children and savages and backward
adults in that piecemeal fashion; when one has once solved
the problem of making a beginning with an animal of highly
developed intelligence one has no need for those halting
methods.  Tobermory can speak our language with perfect
correctness.''

  This time Clovis very distinctly said, ``Beyond-rats!''
Sir Wilfrid was more polite, but equally sceptical.

  ``Hadn't we better have the cat in and judge for