Every Saturday, about four P.M., I am to be found worshipping at the
Shrine of the Open Mind. Once within its portals I put off the subfuse
vestments of J. Watson, Esq., Barrister-at-Law, and become simply Uncle
James. This alone is a tonic. To-day as I ascended the steps of the
temple there floated down to me the voices of the priestesses chanting,
evidently in a kind of frenzy, and to the air of a famous Scottish reel,
this rhyme----
"Daddy is a Sergeant, a Sergeant, a Sergeant!
Daddy is a Sergeant, a Sergeant of Police."
So I opened the nursery door and went in. An uncle has no honour in his
own country, and my two small nieces assaulted me immediately. Phyllis
dragged me to a chair, while Lillah shrieked unrelentingly in my ear
that Daddy was a sergeant.
"So the special constables have seen that your father is a born
policeman?" I said as I sat down.
"The _special_ ones," nodded Phyllis with profound pride.
"Magnificent," I murmured. "He has at last justified his choice of the
law as a profession."
"Tell us," said Lillah, with the air with which one speaks of a
self-made man who has just appeared in the Honours List--"tell us how
Daddy started."
"He went to the Bar," I said.
"Bar?" echoed Lillah.
"Why, yes," I said; "it's a place where people wait."
"Like a station?"
"Only the trains don't always come in. Anyway, on one side of the bar
are a lot of young men waiting for something to turn up, and on the
other a lot of old men writing autobiographies."
"But aren't there any middling-olders?" This is Phyllistian for men of
middle age.
"Not allowed," I said. "At the Bar you are either a junior or a
reminiscer."
"What's that?"
"It's an illness that attacks people who aren't really famous."