The more remote the source of supply the more fixed seems to
be the resolve to run short of the commodity.  The Ark had
probably not quitted its last moorings five minutes before
some feminine voice gloatingly recorded a shortage of
bird-seed.  A few days ago two lady acquaintances of mine
were confessing to some mental uneasiness because a friend
had called just before lunch-time, and they had been unable
to ask her to stop and share their meat as (with a touch of
legitimate pride) ``there was nothing in the house.'' I
pointed out that they lived in a street that bristled with
provision shops and that it would have been easy to mobilize
a very passable luncheon in less than five minutes.
``That,'' they said, with quiet dignity, ``would not have
occurred to us,'' and I felt that I had suggested something
bordering on the indecent.

  But it is in catering for her literary wants that a
woman's shopping capacity breaks down most completely.  If
you have perchance produced a book which has met with some
little measure of success, you are certain to get a letter
from some lady whom you scarcely know to bow to, asking you
``how it can be got.'' She knows the name of the book, its
author, and who published it, but how to get into actual
contact with it is still an unsolved problem to her.  You
write back pointing out that to have recourse to an
ironmonger or a corn-dealer will only entail delay and
disappointment, and suggest an application to a bookseller
as the most hopeful thing you can think of.  In a day or two
she writes again: ``It is all right; I have borrowed it from
your aunt.'' Here, of course, we have an example of the
Beyond-Shopper, one who has learned the Better Way, but the
helplessness exists even when such bypaths of relief are
closed.  A lady who lives in the West End was expressing to
me the other day her interest in West Highland terriers, and
her desire to know more about the breed, so when, a few days
later, I came across an exhaustive article on that subject
in the current number of one of our best known
outdoor-weeklies, I mentioned the circumstance in a letter,
giving the date of that number.  ``I cannot get the paper,''
was her telephoned response.  And she couldn't.  She lived
in a city where news-agents are numbered, I suppose, by the
thousand, and she must have passed dozens of such shops in
her daily shopping excursions, but as far as she was
concerned that article on West Highland terriers might as
well have been written in a missal stored away in some
Buddhist monastery in Eastern Thibet.

  The brutal directness of the masculine shopper arouses a
certain combative derision in the feminine onlooker.  A cat
that spreads one shrew-mouse over the greater part of a long
summer afternoon, and then possibly loses him, doubtless
feels the same contempt for the terrier who compresses his
rat into ten seconds of the strenuous life.  I was finishing
off a short list of purchases a few afternoons ago when I
was discovered by a lady of my acquaintance whom, swerving
aside from the lead given us by her god-parents thirty years
ago, we will call Agatha.

  ``You're surely not buying blotting-paper here?'' she
exclaimed in an agitated whisper, and she seemed so
genuinely concerned that I stayed my hand.

  ``Let me take you to Winks and Pinks,'' she said as soon
as we were out of the building: ``they've got such lovely
shades of blotting-paper---pearl and heliotrope and _momie_
and crushed---!''

  ``But I want ordinary white blotting-paper,'' I said.

  ``Never mind.  They know me at Winks and Pinks,'' she
replied inconsequently.  Agatha apparently has an idea that
blotting-paper is only sold in small quantities to persons
of known reputation, who may be trusted not to put it to
dangerous or improper uses.  After walking some two hundred
yards she began to feel that her tea was of more immediate
importance than my blotting-paper.

  ``What do you want blotting-paper for?'' she asked
suddenly.  I explained patiently.

  ``I use it to dry up the ink of wet manuscript without
smudging the writing.  Probably a Chinese invention of the
second century before Christ, but I'm not sure.  The only
other use for it that I can think of is to roll it into a
ball for a kitten to play with.''

  ``But you haven't got a kitten,'' said Agatha, with a
feminine desire for stating the entire truth on most
occasions.

  ``A stray one might come in at any moment,'' I replied.

  Anyway I didn't get the blotting-paper.

		THE BLOOD-FEUD OF TOAD-WATER
		    A WEST-COUNTRY EPIC

  The Cricks lived at Toad-Water; and in the same lonely
upland spot Fate had pitched the home of the Saunderses, and
for miles around these two dwellings there was never a