THE MAGIC MICROPHONE ; OR, WARNING TO MOTHERS.
The most ingenious exhibit at the Radio Show was the outfit which you are supposed to hang over the baby's cot on your Nannie's evening out, and which is connected to a special loudspeaker in the drawing-room, so that you no longer have to play Bridge in a severe draught with one ear cocked towards the open door and the other trying to listen to the bidding. I heard a curious story, though, about a woman who bought one of these, not from the regular stand but (because it was cheaper) from a disreputable, odd-looking old man in charge of a ramshackle booth which seemed strangely out of place in Olympia. She fixed it up between the cots of her three-months-old twin sons and settled down to a quiet evening of Contract. About nine-thirty the loudspeaker began to crackle and the following fragment of dialogue dumbfounded the Bridge-players :
" For heaven's sake, Archibald, wake up. It's high time that odious woman came back from her cinema and gave us our Bloxo."
" My dear Marmaduke, that stuff isn't worth drinking anyhow, and I for one shall refuse to thrive until they put us on to Glaggen- bury's. The Robertson baby was recommending it to me the other day in the Park." " Really, you know, one's mother's ignorance is absolutely- "
But at that moment, apparently, Archibald made a grab at the microphone, mistaking it for some kind of a rattle, and thus saved his mother from further embarrassment. She has not yet had the apparatus mended, nor has she been able to trace the old man from whom she bought it.
JAN STRUTHER.
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