Various

“ I am aware that this is not an unusual arrangement amongst engaged couples in the class to which Elizabeth belongs; nevertheless I felt it was the moment for judicious advice, knowing how ephemeral are the love-affairs of Elizabeth. No butterfly that flits from flower to flower could be more elusive than her young men. Our district must swarm with this fickle type.
"Do you think it right to go off on a holiday with a stranger?" ”

“ I think I shall buy one of these attractive pets if my pass-book encourages me. Cheaper than a motor-car and far more intelligent and responsive to human affection, a dromedary will add distinction to my establishment and afford pleasant occupation for my leisure. ”

“ The thrill or chuckle of anticipation is succeeded by the shudder or guffaw of realisation. Father nudges Mother and says, "Look, Emma, he's going to fall into the flour-bin." He does fall into the flour-bin, and Father slaps his own or Mother's knee with a roar of triumph. After all, the old dramatic formulæ were not drawn up without a profound knowledge of human nature.
Let managers take a lesson from these few observations and they will no longer go about seeking an answer to the riddle, "Why did the cocoanut shy?" ”

“ This brings you to Brighton, and all you have to do there is to accost the man who takes the tickets in a voice hoarse with fury. "Look here," you will say, "I had an important business engagement at Streatham Common, worth thousands and thousands of pounds to me, and one of your fool porters told me a wrong platform at Victoria. What are you going to do about it?" Now you might think that the porter would reply, "Come off it, Mister; you don't kid me like that," or make some other disappointing and impolite remark; but not a bit of it. Bluster is the thing that pays. ”

“ In these days, when commodities of all kinds are so expensive, one cannot afford to overlook bargains of whatever nature they may be. And it seems to me that a dromedary at sixty-five pounds is really rather cheap.
For after all sixty-five pounds to-day is little more than thirty pounds in pre-war times. Considering their trifling cost I am surprised that more people do not possess dromedaries. Most of my neighbours during the past two years have built garages, but not one, so far as I am aware, has built a dromedary-drome. ”

“ The Haunted Bookshop (Chapman and Hall) is a daring, perhaps too daring, mixture of a browse in a second-hand [pg 80] bookshop and a breathless bustle among international criminals. To estimate the accuracy of its technical details the critic must be a secret service specialist, the mustiest of bookworms and a highly-trained expert in the science and language of the American advertising business. ”

“ The audience (or the only part that really counts) has no desire to be called upon to think; it can afford to pay others to do its thinking for it. There is much to be said for this point of view. The War and its effects (especially the Excess Profits Duty) have imposed on us all far too many and too severe mental jerks; in the theatre we may well forget that we possess such a thing as a mind. ”

“ There effects are flung at the spectator's head like balls at a cocoanut; if they fail to register a hit it is the fault of the shier, not of the nut. My aim throughout has been to throw hard and true, so that even the thickest nut is left in no doubt as to the actuality of the impact. Shoo, Charlotte! makes no high-sounding attempt at improving the public taste. As the dramatic critic of The Sabbath Scoop pithily remarked, it is just "one long feast of laughter and lingerie," and its nightly triumph is the only vindication it requires. ”

“ I will only add that Miss Easton has not a majority mind, that she sees the sad thing more easily than the gay, that I like her work best in her more objective moods, and that, like so many writers of perception, she finds the quintessence of England's beauty in happy Sussex. ”

“ I do not profess to know much about snakes, but I believe the python is a most dangerous reptile, and I see it stated that the pythons which have just arrived at Regent's Park are "large and vigorous, already active and looking for food." Surely this monstrous suggestion, threatening the safety of the peaceful frequenters of the Park, calls for a national protest. Can it be that the Premier is at the back of this, as of every invasion of our rights?
Yours faithfully, Materfamilias.
P.S.—My son says it is a pylon, not a python, but that only makes it worse. ”

“ I say this partly because the accommodation under the seats is not all that it ought to be, and even where there is no heating apparatus a tight fit for large families, and partly because you have to face the possibility that your tickets may be demanded on the platform at the other end. Nor do I favour the method invariably adopted by people in cinema plays, which is to sit on the buffers or the roofs, or conceal yourself among the brakes or whatever they are underneath the carriages. ”

“ Hamilton can be trusted to create tense situations out of the indiscretions of an erring couple, but he also contrives, in spite of its artificial atmosphere, to make us believe in this society, though he tried me rather hard with a scandalmongress of the type we happily meet less often in life than in fiction. ”

“ Tears that strong men weep rose to my eyes, while Henry, at this moment emerging from the study, uttered an ejaculation of joy (it sounded like "Thank God!") at the sight of Elizabeth.
"An' 'ow 'ave you got on while I've bin away?" she inquired, eyeing us both closely. "Did every think go orf orl right?"
I hesitated. How was I to confess my failures and muddling in her absence and hope to have authority over her in future? Would she not become still more difficult to manage if she knew how indispensable she was? I continued to hesitate. Then Henry spoke. "We've managed admirably," he said. ”

“ The German Chancellor and Herr von Simons were described as "two perfectly honest upright men, doing their best to cope with a gigantic task." Their country was making a real effort to meet the indemnity; it was not entirely responsible for the delay in trying the war-criminals, and even in the matter of disarmament was not altogether blameworthy. The Bolshevists also were handled more tenderly than usual. ”

“ It might occur to him besides that, since so many people insisted on giving their wrong ages for the pleasure of fighting in war-time, they had a perfect right to do the same for the pleasure of travelling in peace-time; and in the case of the women his reputation for gallantry would be imperilled if he had the impudence to doubt their word. ”

“ On the whole I think the best way is the one which I mean to adopt myself at the earliest opportunity. Let us suppose that you are going to Brighton. At Victoria Station you will purchase (1) a return ticket to Streatham Common, (2) a platform ticket. The platform ticket entitles you to walk on to the platform from which the Brighton train starts, and, when it is just moving out and all the tickets have been looked at, you will leap on board. ”

“ His Life of Rodman achieved instant success, a far greater than Rodman's Collected Works. The undomesticities of a poet's life naturally excite greater interest in the cultured than his utterances on Love, Destiny and other topics on which poets are apt to discourse. Toller, until then a struggling journalist, became all at once a minor literary celebrity, much in demand at conversaziones and places where they chatter. Sympathy for Rodman aroused curiosity which only Toller could satisfy. ”

“ CHARIVARIA.
"The public will not stand for increased railway fares," says a contemporary. They have had too much standing at the old prices.
A Mile End man writes to The Daily Express to say that one of his ducks laid four eggs in one day. It seems about the most sensible thing the bird could have done with them. ”

“ But, if he has the knowledge, he lacks the fragrance; not to put too fine a point on it, he is long-winded and tends to bore in his disquisitions upon books and bookishness; which is no proper material for a novelist. ”

“ Mersey shipyard workers have made a demand on their employers for five pounds ten shillings a week when not working and seven pounds a week when working. This proposal to discriminate between the men who work and those who don't is condemned in more advanced trade union circles as savouring dangerously of capitalism. ”

“ The Commons had an equally unappetising bill-of-fare, in which Ireland figured appropriately as the pièce de résistance. Sir John Rees' well-meant endeavour to furnish some lighter refreshment by an allusion to the Nauru islanders' habit of "broiling their brothers for breakfast" fell a little flat. The latest news from Belfast suggests that in the expression of brotherly love Queen's Island has little to learn from Nauru.
A SCENE AT THE CLUB.
I never liked Buttinbridge. I considered him a vulgar and pushful fellow. ”

“ Almost for the first time one gains some real idea of the difficulties of the East African campaign, that prolonged tiger hunt, in which every advantage of mobility, of choice of ground, ambush and the like lay with the enemy ”

“ Wayward and capricious heroines who marry young are entitled, I think, to a certain amount of introspective treatment by their authors. Without some knowledge of their mental working it is not very easy for the reader to have patience with them. ”

“ Now-a-days the majority of the paying patrons of these seats come from the ranks of the new custodians of the nation's wealth. These people, who have the business instinct very strongly developed, insistently and very rightly demand value for their money ”

“ The fundamental mistake of the British drama of to-day lies, in my humble opinion, in its perpetual striving after the unexpected. The public, such as I have described it, fights shy of novel situations ”

“ I have read somewhere that when and/or if railway fares are increased it will cost a man travelling with his wife and two children (the children being half-fares) as much as twenty pounds to take third-class return tickets to St. Ives. ”

“ If it turns out that the type possesses two humps it will be able to convey Edgar and Marigold at one and the same time, thus saving delay and inconvenience.
It will be a protection to the house. When we have gone to bed the faithful creature will lie on guard in the hall, and no amount of poisoned liver thrust through the letter-box will assuage its ferocity or weaken its determination to protect the hearth and home of its master against marauders. ”

“ The practice of dispensing with head-gear is also much resented by local outfitters, but otherwise the situation is well in hand. On Monday last Mr. Silas Pargeter, an old resident, caught a fine conger-eel, weighing fifty-six pounds, which he has presented to the Museum. As Borecambe is a good jumping-off ground for the Lake District there are daily char-à-banc excursions to the land of Wordsworth and Ruskin, each passenger being supplied with a megaphone and a pea-shooter. ”

“ That is what I mean to do, and with slight variations the ruse can be applied to almost any non-stop run. Now that I have given the tip I shall hope to find quite a little crowd of disappointed business men round the station exits at holiday time when and/or if railway fares are increased. ”

“ A Newbury man has succeeded in breeding pink-coated tame rats. It is said that the Prohibitionists hope to exterminate these, as they did the green ones.
A blunder of thirty million pounds in the estimates for British operations in Russia is revealed in a White Paper. It is expected that the Government will bequeath it to the nation. ”

“ Lord Curzon hoped that the Peers would not endorse such methods, but would be guided by the example of "Clemency" Canning. The Lords however, by 129 to 86, passed Lord Finlay's motion, to the effect that General Dyer had been unjustly treated and that a dangerous precedent had been established.
The First Commissioner of Works was inundated with questions about the pylon and explained that it had been designed by Sir Frank Baines entirely on his own initiative. ”

“ It is urged that all taxi-cabs should have a cowcatcher in front in case of accidents. We gather that the drivers are quite willing provided they are allowed to charge for anyone they pick up as an "extra." ”

“ It was at first feared that they had overblown themselves.
"A true lover of nature is nowadays very hard to find," complains a writer in a Nature journal. Yet we know a golfer who always shouts "Fore!" ”