Various

“ Barbara, who at her too fond aunt's request had been granted the privilege of taking tea in the drawing-room, stuffed the better half of a jam sandwich into her mouth and came.
"Do you see those rich-looking pink cakes?" I asked her. "You shall have one as soon as we've had a little talk."
"The biggest and pinkiest one?" demanded Barbara.
"Yes. Now tell me—don't you think that people ought always to speak the truth, and to be especially careful not to distort the remarks of others?" ”

“ You'd never believe the amazing remarks she makes. Just now, for instance, we happened to be discussing the comparative love of truth inherent in men and women, and Barbara chipped in and told me she thought women were far more careless of the truth than men."
"Good heavens!" said Tom, who is a bachelor by conviction. "She certainly hit the nail on the head there."
"Yes, and she added that she herself prized truth above chocolates."
"It sounds almost incredible," gasped Tom.
"Doesn't it? But ask Julia; she heard it all. And Julia will also tell you what Barbara remarked about my work." ”

“ Lloyd George will find himself confronted by no small difficulty when dealing with the glacier. What can he say that the glacier is doing? It must do something. A glacier is of no rhetorical value if it merely stays where it is. One may take in hand the ice-axe of resolution and the alpenstock of enterprise and pull over one's boots the socks of Coalition, but the glacier remains practically unchanged by these preparations. ”

“ Barbara. In the libery.
Julia. Working hard, I suppose?
Barbara. Yes.
Julia. Or do you think he's sleeping? (No answer.) Don't you think father's probably asleep half the time he's supposed to be working?
Barbara. Probly. What you got in that bag?
Julia. I expect that big armchair he sits in is just a weeny bit too comfy for real work.
Barbara. I've eated up all those choc'lates you did bring me.
Julia. Perhaps we'll find some more presently. Do you think Father writes in his sleep?
Barbara. Yes, I fink he does.
Julia. Listen to her, Suzie. I expect really he only dreams he's working. ”

“ And don't you think that women are much more careless of the truth than men?"
"Yes. Can I——"
"Do you love your Aunt Julia?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Cos she always has got choc'lates in her bag."
"But don't you think it's much more important to have the truth in your heart than chocolates in your bag?"
"Yes. Now can I have my pink cake?"
I released and rewarded her, and Julia prepared to speak her mind. Fortunately, however, just at that moment my brother Tom, who is Barbara's godfather, came in.
"Why, what a big girl we're getting!" ”

“ The man who sets out to expose popular fallacies or to confound time-honoured legends is bound to make enemies.
The latest legend I have been privileged to explore is not the product of superstition and slow time, but a deliberately manufactured growth of comparatively recent origin. It is concerned with Barbara, not the impersonal lady who figures in the old logic-book doggerel, but an extremely live and highly illogical person to whom for half a decade I have had the honour to be father. It is also concerned with Barbara's Aunt Julia and, in a lesser degree, with Barbara's mother. ”

“ Show me a really bad man—dark-complexioned, with well-cut clothes and a black moustache—and I will show you a hero; a hero a little distorted, it is true, but not much the less heroic for that. Show me a notorious breaker of male hearts and laws and—so long as she is still in business—I will show you a heroine ”

“ He will hold forth with a horrible intimacy and a yet more horrible ignorance on the most private secrets of her inner life. Not one throb of her young cylinders will be sacred, yet never will he understand her as she would like to be understood. ”

“ Hero-worship, if the hero be worthy, is a very pardonable weakness, and they should certainly admire the skill and humour with which he has patched together, or invented where seemly, the story of lanky Abe, with his axeman's skill, his immense physical strength, his poor head for shopkeeping, his passion for books, his lean purse and "shrinking pants," his wit, courage and resource. ”

“ Bacheller makes his hero speak a little too sententiously at times, and certainly some of his other folk say queer things, such as, "What so vile as a cheap aristocracy, growing up in idleness, too noble to be restrained, with every brutal passion broad-blown as flush as May?" ”

“ For the protection of the medulla nothing is better than the admirable hat recently placed on the market by the benevolent enterprise of a great newspaper. But an effective substitute can be improvised out of a square yard of linoleum lined with cabbage-leaves and fastened with a couple of safety-pins.
As the late Sir Andrew Clark remarked in a luminous phrase, Nature forgives but she never forgets. The complete gardener should always aim (unlike the successful journalist) at keeping his head cool and his feet warm ”

“ As a novelist he has scarcely fulfilled his early promise, but it is on record that he was once introduced to a stranger from the backwoods, who asked ignorantly, "Am I speaking to the statesman or the author?" ”

“ No, the ships they all are yarning, just the same as sailors do,
Just the same as deep-sea sailors from Port Talbot to Chefoo,
Yarning through the hours of darkness till the daylight comes again,
But oh! the things they speak of no one knows but sailormen. ”

“ I am like the lady herring; I don't approve of all this talk about the insides of things; it seems to me to be rather indecent—unless, of course, you do it very nicely, like that young herring. When you go and look at a horse you don't ask how its sweetbread is arranged, or what is the principle of its liver. Then why should you...?
Well, here we are, and very comfortable too. But why does none of these cars have any means of communication between the owner and the man next to the chauffeur? There is always a telephone to the chauffeur, but none to the overflow guest on the box. ”

“ John Tempest, who in the hardships of his escape has lost memory of his own identity, never ceases to protest that he is at least not the other John for whom the members of the Seneschal family persist in taking him—a twist that makes for piquancy if hardly for added probability. ”

“ It appears that nothing definite has yet been decided as to whether The Daily Mail will publish a Continental edition of the Sandringham Hat.
The matter having passed out of the hands of D.O.R.A., the Westminster City Council recommend the abolition of the practice of whistling for cabs at night. Nothing is said about the custom of making a noise like a five-shilling tip.
We shall not be surprised if Mr. Austen Chamberlain becomes the Viceroy of India, says a gossip-writer. ”

“ All the year round they can study ad nauseam their own individual bloaters; but this is the only occasion on which they have the whole world of bloaters paraded in front of them for inspection. Now only can they compare notes and exchange grievances.
And how closely they study the parade! Here is a pretty limousine, a blonde; see how she watches the two huge exhibits in front of her. They are very new bloaters, and one of them—oh, horror!—one of them is going to buy. He has never bought before; she knows his sort. He will drive her to death; he may even drive her himself ”

“ Among the passengers on the boat was a tall dark man with a black moustache and well-cut clothes who spent most of his time walking the deck or reading alone in his chair. Every ship has such recluses, who often, however, are on the fringe of several sets, although members of none. ”

“ He is like one of those people in the papers with zig-zags sticking out all over them because they have been careful to wear an electric belt. He exudes force. Sometimes one can almost hear him crackle. ”

“ Asquith appealed to the Government to substitute a measure more generous to Irish aspirations, there was no sting in either of their speeches. The Prime Minister, while defending his scheme as the best that could be granted in the present temper of Southern Ireland, did not bang the door against further negotiations; and Sir Edward Carson said that Ulstermen were beginning to realize that the Parliament thrust upon them might be a blessing in disguise, and expressed the hope that in working it they would set an example of tolerance and justice to all classes. ”

“ However, the inevitable solution of the problem provides a story entertaining enough, though not, I think, one that will obliterate your memory of others, incomparable, from hands to which we all owe a debt of long enjoyment. ”

“ People walked for hours longer than they liked or even intended in order to have a chance of passing him in his chair and scrutinising again the features that masked such depravity. For that they masked it cannot be denied. ”

“ If you protest that the resulting situation is not only wildly improbable but becoming a stock-in-trade of our novelists, I must admit the first charge, but point out that the authors here secure originality by making the deception an unintended one. ”

“ The newly-poor man wishes he had in him the stuff of which millionaires are made, and the profiteer sighs for a few pints of the true ultramarine Norman blood, as it would be so helpful when dealing with valets, gamekeepers and the other haughty vassals of his new entourage. ”

“ The picture of pioneering America in the thirties is a fresh and interesting one.
To few of those who visit Switzerland, with its incomparable mountains, can it have occurred that, once a man is kept there against his will, it can be a prison as damnable as any other ”

“ Certainly in his story there is an old lady who spends more of the winter on a lawn than any old lady of my acquaintance could be induced to, even with rugs and a summer-house to make up for the comforts of the fireside; but Miss Barbara and her site really have not so much to do with the tale as its title seems to imply. The love affairs of a young officer who, while blind from wounds, fell in love with his nurse to the extent of becoming engaged to her and didn't recognise her when they met again, are Mr. ”

“ There surely enough was a photo of him and "the waife," sitting on a public garden-seat eating pasties and underneath the legend—
"SUITS YOUNG AND OLD ALIKE.
An old couple snapped in Hyde Park. The gentleman, smart though elderly, is seen wearing a brown model of The Daily Mail hat." ”

“ Julia (who besides being Barbara's aunt is Suzanne's sister) had come to tea and was chatting in the drawing-room with Suzanne (who besides being Julia's sister is Barbara's mother and my wife) and Barbara (whose relationship all round has been sufficiently indicated) . The drawing-room door was open, and so was that of my study on the opposite side of the passage, where I was coquetting with a trifle of work. The conversation, which I could not help overhearing, was confined for the most part to Julia and Barbara, and ran more or less on the following lines:—
Julia. Where's Father, Babs? ”

“ On Monday morning Uncle Tom Brimacombe had driven off in his trap with his wife to the nearest station, five miles away, and had gone up to London for the first time in his life, "to see about a legacy."
"Lunnon! mai laife. It's a vaine plaace. Ai used 'think Awkeyampton was a big town, but ai'm barmed if Lunnon dawn't beat un.
"As you knaw, Zur, us 'ad to get up and gaw off 'bout three in th' morn'n, and us got upalong Lunnon 'bout tain. Well, the waife knew 'er waay 'bout, laike ”

“ If it be urged that a few trifling inaccuracies have crept into the sketch which is here given of a great statesman's personality I can only say, "Humanum est errare," and "Homo sum: humani nihil alienum a me puto." These two Latin sentences, I find, invariably soothe all angry passions; you have only to try their effect the next time you stamp on the foot of a stout man when alighting from an Underground train.
Of all the present-day politicians, and indeed there are not a few, upon whose mantelpieces the bust of Napoleon Bonaparte is displayed, Mr. ”

“ Of the man himself perhaps the most distinguishing characteristic is dynamic energy. Whether other people's energy is ever dynamic I do not know, but undoubtedly Mr. Winston Churchill's is; he dominates, he quells. ”

“ Gandhi's appeals to ignorance and fanaticism, he tartly replied that ignorance and fanaticism were very dangerous things, "whether in India or on the benches of this House."
Mr. Stewart expressed anxiety lest under the new arrangements with Egypt the Sudan water-supply should be subjected to Egyptian interference. Mr. Harmsworth was of opinion that for geographical reasons the Sudan would always be able to look after its own water-supply ”

“ Indeed, it is simple to understand why the Canadian portion of the audience almost rise from their seats when Fergus Wimbus, the 'Man,' says, 'Canada is the land of big things, big thoughts, bing hopes. ”

“ But the hedgehog cannot be cooked until he is caught, and his capture should not be attempted without strong gloves. Those recently invented by Lord Thanet are far the best for the purpose. It is a moot point among culinary artists whether the hedgehog should be served en casserole or in coquilles ”

“ Lloyd George may make a grave slip in negotiating the glacier.
Then the "awful avalanche" has not yet been dealt with. A few helpful words on the direction this is likely to take and the safest rock to make for when it begins to move might be welcomed by the Premier's followers. He may argue that it is folly to meet trouble half-way, but on the other hand, if he does not speak on this subject soon, the opportunity may disappear. Let him avoid the glacier if he chooses; he cannot (so we are informed) escape the avalanche.
[pg 387]
TREATING UNDER PROHIBITION.
[pg 388]
Magistrate. ”