Various

“ I see by The Dentists' Daily that our Union has declared a sympathetic strike with the Amalgamated Excavators and Theological Students. You have my sympathy. I can no more."
George tried to persuade me as we went downstairs together, bumping our heads on each step in turn, but it was of no avail.
I do not however regret my pious invention, as I hear that George is a changed man. Being intelligent, he thought things over for himself, instead of letting a man in a red tie do it for him, and after six weeks came to the conclusion that a strike is a game that more than one can play at. ”

“ Why think cheaply? It's a poor imagination that won't run to a six-cylinder car at least. Strictly, I shall never own a real motor scooter. What of it? In my mind I use Rolls-Royces. We've rather worked the thing up at home. Come and dine with us and see for yourself."
We had sausages and mashed potatoes, with water. And I may say that never have I enjoyed a meal more. You see, Holder kept on telling us all the time about the famous dinner which now, owing to the War, we should never really eat, but which we were at perfect liberty to imagine we were eating. ”

“ Holder rang for the visionary footman, a good-looking, most willing, sensible man, according to Holder's quick portrait of him, who piled up some great logs on a bank of coals of a positively fantastic size, and we gathered round to enjoy a run in the brand-new, latest model Rolls-Royce which is one of the special things which Holder will never possess in this world. ”

“ THE BEST OF THINGS.
"The New Poor?" said Holder, like myself, one of them. "Nonsense. There are none. There are people who will not use their imaginations, of course. They are poor, but not newly so. This so-called new poverty doesn't touch me. True, the money I make will not go so far as it used to, but my imagination goes very much farther. ”

“ Mutatis mutandis, Mr. Shaw would not thank Sir Edward Elgar for calling him, for example, the Voltaire de nos jours. What he does enjoy is the frank disparagement of Mr. Wilfrid Blunt, who describes him in the second volume of My Diary, just published, as "an ugly fellow, his face a pasty-white, with a red nose and a rusty red beard, and little slaty-blue eyes."
An interesting but, we regret to say, decidedly hostile estimate of Mr. Lloyd George as a musician appears in the columns of a leading anti-Coalition daily. ”

“ I said, "Open, please," and George opened. I then took my nice little steel whangee, beautifully polished, and tickled the delinquent. A gentle tickle and no more. I didn't really go far—not farther than his back collar-stud—but George said things as if I were a capitalist.
I then said coldly, "It doesn't hurt!" I am what is known in the profession as a painless dentist and rarely feel much pain.
I capped his repartee by remarking, "Keep open, please." That always shuts 'em up. George kept open. ”

“ The lad had finished his sausage, and mashed potato alone is not inspiring. But that great man, Holder, noticed it in time, and he satisfied the child with a word-painting of the brown crisp skin of cooked goose. Then we drank some magnificent wine. Holder [pg 95] ransacked the English language for it. A vivifying champagne.
But enough of food, or you will think we were gourmands. None of us cared for any sweets after such a meal. And that is what I like about the Holders: with them enough is as good as the feast they will never have. ”

“ A musician and an art-and-crafty girl, both poor and both dull, are engaged. The musician, visiting his fiancée, now well off and installed in a comfortable village farm-house, lets the strong air of the place get into his head and falls deep in love with a yeoman's daughter, who in turn, stimulated by this experience, straightway succumbs (at her first dance in real society, into which the great lady of the village, her patron, has introduced her) to the suggestion that she shall spend an unchaperoned night on a young blood's yacht, with results usual in distressful fiction. ”

“ Why aren't you dressed in a coat that is pink in spots and a cap that is velvet in places, flipping over your stone-faced banks on a rampageous four-year-old that you bought for ten pounds down, ten pounds some time, a sack of seed oats and an old saddle, and will eventually palm off on an Englishman at Ballsbridge for two hundred cash? ”

“ An allied species, the Chinese or edible guinea-pig, the Sing Fat Soo of the Cantonese restaurateur, is indeed quite plentiful, but for some reason or other has never found favour with the leading English fanciers. The fact is that since the War our customers have become more discerning, and the common guinea-pig, being no longer called for, is not bred and has therefore ceased to be available for scientific purposes. ”

“ Bernard Shaw, who, it may be necessary to remind youthful readers, was a musical critic on The Star and The World before he achieved fame as a dramatist, has been causing his friends and admirers serious misgivings by his article on Sir Edward Elgar in a new musical journal, Music and Letters. Sir Edward Elgar has a great following; he has written oratorios; he is an O.M.; yet Mr. Shaw salutes him as the greatest English composer, the true lineal descendant of Beethoven, one of the Immortals and the only candidate for Westminster Abbey! To find Mr. Shaw taking a majority view is bad enough ”

“ I used to think of a four-hundred-pound car, or perhaps, in a daring moment, my thoughts would creep timidly, like mice out into a still kitchen, on to the six-hundred-pound plane, only to scurry back to the lower plane almost instantly. ”

“ Do ye remember that greasy divil Peter Flynn that owns a draper's shop in Ballinknock main street? A fat man he is with the flowing locks of a stump orator, given to fancy waistcoats and a frock-coat—very dressy. ”

“ It is all very well asking Germany to hand over her war criminals, but the trouble is to find enough innocent men to round them up.
The rumour current in France, to the effect that our Premier has been seen in London, is believed by Parisians to have been spread by political rivals.
The Bolshevists recently deported from America were welcomed on the Finnish frontier by the Red Army and eleven brass bands playing "The International." That ought to teach them to get deported again.
A Thames bargee has summoned a colleague for throwing a huge piece of coal at him. Quite right too. ”

“ He did not stay long, as he had to go on sympathetic strike with the graziers. He was not really a grazier as well as a plumber, but his heart was so tender that he couldn't keep on plumbing so as to give satisfaction, he said, as long as the graziers were not grazing, so to speak. It didn't really matter. Nothing matters nowadays. I just went out and sold the house as it stood for an enormous sum and emigrated on the proceeds to Tooting Bec.
But this tract deals with George and his conversion, and has been written specially to be put into the hands of young plumbers. ”

“ Leadbitter to have learnt some at least of his craft. His new story, Shepherd's Warning (Allen and Unwin) , is a quiet tale of life in a not specially attractive village—a tale that conquers by its direct humanity and by an art so delicate and so deftly concealed that the book has a deceptive appearance of having written itself without effort on the part of its author. It concerns a group of peasants, agricultural labourers, inhabitants of Fidding, a village gradually yielding to the encroachments by tram and villa of the neighbouring town. ”

“ As a pianist he is equally unsatisfactory; his repertory is extremely limited and he is quite unable to interpret the complex harmonies of the Russian School.
A painful example of Mr. Lloyd George's ignorance is forthcoming in the astounding fact that he is, or was, under the impression that Karsavina was the name of a town, and that the only musician of the name of Corelli was the author of The Sorrows of Satan. The critic concludes with a masterly analysis of the results of these short-comings on the vitality of the Coalition Cabinet, already weakened by the withdrawal of Mr. ”

“ After dinner we smoked a very fine cigar in the imaginary conservatory which Holder has just run up, and I have rarely, if ever, heard a better description of men smoking cigars in a conservatory. Next, Holder played me a fast game of billiards. ”

“ The film actress has a life of constant change. As soon as she has finished being "Dare-Devil Daisy"—
FIXES THE HARE.
I found Andy Devenish, of Castle Devenish, Co. Cork, in Piccadilly. He was wearing an old frieze overcoat, the bottom of which had suffered from a puppy's teeth, and a bowler hat with a guard-ring dangling from its flat brim. His freckled nose was squashed against Fore's window as he gazed wistfully at the sporting prints within. I led him gently westwards, pushed him into the club's best arm-chair, placed the wine of our mutual country at his elbow and spoke to him severely. ”

“ On the fourth day we were nearing Flynn's house, the dog leading the pack by not fifty yards, when I saw him cut across a field to the left, while the hounds tumbled into a little boreen that runs up from the railway-station and went streaking down it singing out as if they were on a breast-high scent and in view.
"'Begob,' says I to Patsey, 'they've changed; they're running a hare, I believe.'
"'Tis a hare in a frock-coat then, Sor,' says he, pointing with his whip. ”

“ He has a very lively and convincing way of putting things too, and once he gets his enthusiasm fairly in hand becomes an uncommonly powerful advocate. Not that this volume is by any means just a piece of special pleading; only the author is honourably concerned to show both the importance and the severity of the war against the Bulgars, which he thinks people at home were a little inclined to disparage. ”

“ Otherwise your play will be affected by arithmetical troubles.'
"Accompanied by my faithful Wilkins I found my ball and reviewed the situation. The driver and hockey stick were hopeless for mashie shots, but Wilkins reported a practicable C.T. a few yards to the right, leading to the front line, and some gently sloping revetting from thence to the level. Luckily the C.T. had plenty of length to each traverse, and when I emerged in the open with my sixty-seventh Laxey was only just getting clear of the huts, having been badly bunkered in the coal dump. ”

“ So I claimed the ten francs; but I didn't mention to Laxey that the following morning I was passing a group of the coolies and saw them with an object that looked suspiciously like Laxey's ball, hammering it with a stick and trying to make it say Bang!"
Constable (to dreamy little foreigner) . "I don't know where you were born, Tich, but I'll give odds you'll die in England."
"Wanted, Second Housemaid of three, Scotchwoman preferred; willing to wait on table if required; comfortable situation."—Daily Paper.
Possibly; but we always prefer our servants to do their waiting on the floor. ”

“ A man who deliberately associates with parsnips should be shown no mercy.
A news message states that passports enabling Mr. Ramsay Macdonald to proceed to Russia have been refused. As a result we understand that the well-known Socialist has threatened to remain in this country. ”

“ A rumour is going about that martial law may be declared in Ireland at any moment. By which of the armies of occupation does not seem clear.
To make money, says a London magistrate, one must work hard. ”