This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
ANCIENT BRITONS AND MODERN
15

"I wonder what we could have for woad," pondered the President, on finding that her colleague had rooted objections to sustaining the rôle of a Miserable Sinner on Judgment Day.

"Woad is what the Ancient Britons went about in," she said. "Buster told me all about the Invasion of Britain when I showed him the picture. He said they went about in the woady buff and didn't care a blow. Not if it rained. . . . No police and no Grundies, he said,"

"But what is woad?" asked he of the tenacious and inquiring mind.

"Paint. Blue paint. Something like the blue devils and dragons on Buster's arm. Like tattooing."

The Vice's spirit soared, and he produced an idea, simple as all great notions are.

"Paint me blue with the 'pwussian blue' in your box of water colourths," he said, and capered with glee at the very bare idea.

His leader congratulated him upon his quiet brilliance, bade him disrobe to the irreducible minimum the while she disinterred her paint-box and procured a cup of water.