Various

“ In real life Southerners are melancholy men with a tendency to embonpoint and clawhammer coats of ante-bellum design. But in Lesser American Fiction they are for some undiscovered reason always "fiery." To the fiery one the heroine "unconsciously turns" when the apparent earmarks of the hero's wormhood are dramatically revealed, and of course she hands him what she would probably describe as the "sister" stuff when the gentleman emerges in his natural colours. ”

“ Even the villains turn out to be comparative gentlemen in the end, the dirty work being conveniently fastened upon some "person or persons unknown." The yarn is well enough to wile away an hour; but in these days of burning realities fiction has lost its bite unless it too is informed with the spirit of reality. ”

“ In fine, a book that all Service folk, and many besides them, will find a treasure-house of good stories, of exactly the kind that should be certain of their appeal now, when we are all, or like to think ourselves, soldiers in the greatest of England's wars, and inheritors of the traditions here shown in the making. ”

“ Once upon a time, in the midst of the most detestable Spring ever known—a Spring consisting entirely of hopes of better weather, raised for no other purpose than to be so thwarted and dashed that the spirits of that brave and much harassed creature, man, might sink still lower—once upon a time, even in this Spring, there was a fine evening. ”

“ There are two or three horses of unusual intelligence, which no doubt our friend the Hun would long since have devoured, but which, even though hunting is over, are by some odd freak of sentiment or even of loyalty still kept alive. There are rabbits. And there is a bird in a cage against the wall of a small yard. This bird is a chaffinch, which a friend had brought over from France.
After I had fraternised shamefully with all these deplorable drones, my hostess drew my attention to the French chaffinch, a fine big fellow, very tame and cheerful. ”

“ Therefore you see an infantry soldier has one weapon and one only—the rifle. You fellows will be out at the Front pretty soon. Now, if a man gets up the line, no matter how strong he is, how well drilled, if he can't use his rifle he might just as well not be there for all the good he is to his country. ”

“ Pangs of hunger are endured nobly, hard-hearted folk are softened, lonely women fight and win the battle against depression. If these pictures of life behind the windows of our village streets are too couleur de BUCKROSE to be quite true, there is nevertheless a real quality in them. ”

“ The British offensive has been arrested, says the Vossische Zeitung. Presumably for exceeding the speed limit.
A gossip-writer says he is of the opinion that there will be a great revolution in Germany and that the KAISER will be at the head of it. It would be only decent to give him, say, a couple of lengths start.
Over one million persons visited the Zoo last year. The chief attraction appears to have been a German gentleman from the Cameroons who is being accommodated in the Monkey House.
A North London employer is advertising for men "any age up to one hundred years." ”

“ The hero, for example, is introduced to us abed, and semi-delirious, waited upon by a pale and sinister young female whom he detests. He appears to be in a house strange to him, which contains also an unpleasant old woman and a queer little boy whose behaviour is wrop in mystery. ”

“ I can't 'elp wot the drill-sergeant tells yer. When I sez "'Shun" I want fingers straight down. On the command "Sitting—down" every man sits down tailor-fashion. Sitting—down. [This is the position in which Swedish drill squads hear words of wisdom.] Listen. An' look at me over there—not that I likes the look of yer—'as to put up with that, but when I torks I wants attention. Let me arsk yer this. Wot sort of men do we want in France? Why, fit men. 'Ow do yer get fit? I makes yer fit. 'Ow? Why, physical. Wot's the good of a bloke in the trenches if he's sick parade every bloomin' day? ”

“ The Adjutant (after two hours' extended order drill and attack practice) .—Just sit down. Close in a bit. Light your pipes if you wish. Let me tell you that the sort of work we've been doing this afternoon is the only way we're ever going to finish off the Hun—absolutely. You can never win a war by squatting down in a hole and lookin' at the other fellow. No, open fighting—that's what the new armies have got to learn. ”

“ I soon reached a favourite meadow, with a view of the hills and clumps of gorse in it, and, since there were clumps of gorse, many, many of those alluring little creatures which live in the ground and provide man with numbers of benefits—such as sweet flesh to put into pies ”

“ All you have to do is to take the quotient of x divided by y, where x can be raised to the nth power and y can be raised to the nth-1, and add to this the least common denominator of the number of votes cast for the last three candidates, taking care to eliminate in each case the square root of z, where z equals the number of voters belonging to the Church of England, minus Archdeacons and Rural Deans, but inclusive of Minor Canons and Precentors. ”

“ England and Scotland are to enjoy an educational campaign, in which hundreds of speakers all over the country will dilate upon the necessity of reducing the consumption and preventing the waste of foodstuffs. ”

“ There is a dog there which is actually allowed to eat, in defiance of all those Times' correspondents whose sole idea of this stimulating and unfailingly devoted animal is that it is personified greed on four legs. ”

“ The chiefest dooty of a soljer is O-bedience. Drill an' discipline is 'ow you gets that. Stop chewin, 'Arris. You'll be losin' your name again, me lad. Don't pay to lose your name twice—not in this regiment it don't. You'll learn a deal of other stuff 'ere; but take it from me it's the barrick-square work wot makes a soljer. Wot is a soljer? Why, a drilled man. 'Ow jer think I 'ave turned some 'undreds of blankety militiamen into the real thing? If a bloke can't stan' still on parade I don't want to hear about his [pg 269] doin's on the range or 'ow he can chuck a Mills. ”

“ An enthusiast who is cultivating the ninth hole on one course is offering long odds that bogey will be not less than two tons.
An electrical engineer has been sent as a substitute for a milker to a Sussex farmer, who, with the characteristic obstinacy of his class, refuses to accept the expert's assurance that all his cows are suffering from dry cells. ”

“ A quiet style, keen powers of observation, and a delightful assumption of his own unimportance combine to make Mr. FREDERICK PALMER'S With the New Army on the Somme (MURRAY) a book that will be read long after the Hun has returned to the place from which he came. "Those whose business it was to observe, the six correspondents ... went and came always with a sense of incapacity and sometimes with a feeling that writing was a worthless business when others were fighting." ”

“ What most strikes the imagination is that amid the most stirring events of the greatest war in history British Legislators should devote three of their precious hours to so trumpery an affair. Was this what the old jurist had in mind when he called the House of Commons "The Great Inquest of the Nation"?
Wednesday, April 18th.—On the motion introduced in both Houses to express the welcome of Parliament to our new Ally, Mr. BONAR LAW, paraphrasing CANNING, declared that the New World had stepped in to redress the balance of the Old; Mr. ”

“ Bloggs. "Not a rap! Not a rap! Get rid of 'em!" was his reply. Naturally I felt hurt. It was not so much what he said as the way he said it. The mere mention of my sermons always seems to make him irritable. Why I cannot imagine.
My dear wife advises me to send them down to the schoolhouse. The children, she thinks, might use the backs (I write on one side of the paper only) for their sums. But I fear such an expedient might give rise to a spirit of irreverence.
Would Your Grace hold me greatly to blame were I to raffle them at our next rummage sale? I feel sure they would fetch a good price. ”

“ You have now got two candidates elected, A. and B. You take from them 653 votes, which do not legitimately belong to them, and you mix them up with the surplus votes of the remaining eight candidates. Unless C. is a congenital idiot, or a felon, or otherwise incapacitated, he will then be found to have 4,129 votes, and he too will be elected. For the last place you must proceed on a basis of geometrical progression. ”

“ Any series of complex co-ordinated movements can be performed with the greatest economy of effort only when they have become semi-reflex; and for this to happen the correlated series of nervous impulses must be linked up by higher development of the brain cells. ”

“ Sergeant-Instructor of Bayonet-Fighting.—On guard. Long point. Withdraw. On guard. Rest. Now, when I snap my fingers I want to see you come to the high port and get roun' me like lightning. Some of you men seem to be treatin' this bizness in a light-'earted way. We don't do this work to prevent you gettin' into mischief. Not much. Wotjer join the army for? To fight. Right. I shows yer how to fight. 'Ow many Fritzes jer think I've killed, by teachin' rookies the proper use of the baynit? This is the goods. 'Ow are we goin' to win this bloomin' war? With the rifle? ”

“ The use of human food for the nourishment of animals is, however, being discouraged; and for the future guinea-pigs and broken glass will be the staple diet of boa-constrictors and ostriches respectively. ”

“ The Germans don't fill up their front trenches with a lot of soldiers to be killed with shrapnel. No, a machine gun every twenty or thirty yards is quite enough to hold any defensive line. So just bear these things in mind ”

“ It has rather flummoxed us in our office. We can't make head or tail—"
"You may thank your stars," he interrupted, "that you've come to the right shop. I'll make it all as clear as daylight in two shakes of a pig's whisker. Are you ready?"
I said I was, and he began to pour forth at once.
"Imagine," he said, "a constituency of 40,000 voters who elect four representatives. Obviously anyone who gets 40,001 votes is elected. Well then, there are ten candidates. ”

“ The matter to which I refer is closely connected with the sad shortage of paper. It is no doubt known to Your Grace that many ministers of the Gospel, though capable of eloquence of a high order, write their sermons. Old sermons tend to increase and multiply at an alarming rate. ”