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The "Great Lexicographer"--tutelary deity ofposterity a definition of the act of eating which houl "Eat: to devour with the enial a function: cynical, indelicate, and finally unforgivable by reason of its very accuracy For, after all, that is what eating amounts to, if one must needs express it with such crude brutality But if "the ingestion of alie upon the older formula--is in itself a process material even unto carnality, it is undeniable that it forreeable accompaniht, re-enforced by accessory candles, falls on the little table in the first-floor roo on Fetter Lane--only now the curtains are drawn--the conversation is not the less friendly and bright for a running accooblet and jovial gurgle of wine-flask On the contrary, to one of us, at least--to wit, Godfrey Bellingham--the occasion is one of uncommon festivity, and his boyish enjoyestions of hard tily, but keenly felt nevertheless

The talk flitted fro itself withthe critical subject of John Bellingham's will From the stepped pyramid of Sakkara with its encaustic tiles to mediaeval church floors; from Elizabethan ork to Mycaenaean pottery, and thence to the industrial arts of the Stone Age and the civilisation of the Aztecs I began to suspect that al friends were so carried away by the interest of the conversation that they had forgotten the secret purpose of the , for the dessert had been placed on the table (by Mrs Gu funeral bakemeats), and still no reference had been made to the "case" But it seea the intimacy to ripen while he watched for the opportunity And that opportunity came, even as Mrs Gulasses

"So you had a visitor last night, Doctor," said Mr Bellingham "I hty curious he was about you I have never known Jellicoe to be so inquisitive before What did you think of hi We entertained one another for quite a long tier curiosity, he replying with a defensive attitude of universal ignorance It was aencounter"