Various

“ The grooms of my brother-officers never learn that Steggles' vacuous expression is the disguise of an intellect subtle, discriminating and alert, so they never trouble to endeavour to forestall him. To find Sapphira is to find Steggles, as he always likes to spread his blanket where she could tread on him if she wanted anything during the night.
From time to time he chooses the occasion of a night's halt on the march to indulge in a bilious attack; but he has no other vice except an inveterate reluctance to leave off polishing my boots when I mount. ”

“ In addition to dulness of hearing, Steggles is endowed—I should indeed be ungrateful to use the word afflicted—with a vacuity of expression which puts rivals or antagonists off their guard, and doubles his value during the vicissitudes of active service. What would be handicaps to ordinary men Steggles turns to the advantage of himself, Sapphira my mare, and me. ”

“ I found her on the floor wrestling with brown paper, preparing a parcel for her soldier on Salisbury Plain. She adopted him through a League, and spends all her spare time and pocket-money in socks and cigarettes for him. She smiled at me wanly, with a piece of string between her teeth, and I felt I simply must do something to cheer her up.
"I've brought you some chocolates for your cold," I said. "Eat one and forget the War and the weather," and I handed her Bobbie's box. Her necessity, as someone says somewhere, seemed at the moment so much greater than his. ”

“ I too think we must have peace, but how shall we obtain it when we have a friend and ally who watches us with the closest care, and would not allow us even to hint at any steps that would really lead to peace? ”

“ Sire, you are a young man, but you are a scion of a great and ancient House, which was powerful and illustrious when the Hohenzollerns were but mean and petty barbarian princelings. Withdraw yourself, while the opportunity is still with you, from the fatal domination of this vain and inflated upstart who endeavours to serve only his own selfish designs. ”

“ You have really the best right to them."
She handed me the box of chocolates. I gazed at my travelled Saint and he gazed back. I could almost have sworn he winked.
Clutching him and his dragon, I departed and danced down the corridor into the hall. There waited Bobbie, red-haired and khaki-clad, more like St. George than the gallant knight himself.
"How do you do?" I greeted him. "Many happy returns, dear old thing!" As he held out his hand I put something into it. "A box of chocolates," I explained; "I bought them for your birthday!" ”

“ Fiona was a charming young woman (Irish, of course) with a rich uncle and a poor, very unattractive cousin, who loved her for her expectations. As Fiona had no conception about money beyond the spending of it, the uncle made a will, whose object was that she should have plenty. The suitor, however, knowing of this, and being a naughty, rather improbable person, destroyed part of it, with the result that Fiona was apparently left only the ancestral home and no cash to keep it up. ”

“ GLADSTONE, from whom anyone could draw a postcard and most people a chip of some recently-felled tree, and who is in my mind wonderful and supreme by reason of two inventions which, though no one would ever guess them to be the result of a Prime Minister's cogitations, deserve the widest fame. ”

“ Our enemies will make peace with you, and thus he too will be forced to abandon the War. With him and with the deeds that have outraged the world they will not initiate any movement that tends to peace. ”

“ So me bowld mascot he stops up at the Castle and makes free with the flower-beds and the hall and the drawin'-room and the domestic maids the way he'd be the Lord-Lieutenant o' the land, and not jist a plain human Angory goat. A proud arrygent crature it is, be the powers! Steppin' about as disdainy as a Dublin gerrl in Ballydehob, and if, mebbe, you'd address him for to get off your flower-beds with the colour of anger in your mouth he'd let a roar out of him like a Sligo piper with poteen taken, and fetch you a skelp with his horns that would lay you out for dead. ”

“ G.W.E. RUSSELL—I forget whom—was to wrap up the sponge in a bath-towel and jump on it. Here, for the historical painter, is a theme indeed—something worth all the ordinary dull occasions which provoke his talented if somewhat staid brush: the great Liberal statesman, the promoter of Home Rule, the author of The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture, leaping upon the bath-towel that held his sponge. But no historical painter could do justice to such a scene. It needs the movies.
Those of us then who dry our sponges in this way—and I am a fervent devotee—owe the inventor a meed of praise. ”

“ Not from Hungary, where we are within a narrow margin of financial collapse, and not in Austria, where there is already to all intents and purposes a state of bankruptcy. More money is not to be got, for we have none ourselves and nobody will lend us any. ”

“ It is explained by a railway official that a passenger who pays threepence for a ticket to-day is really only giving the company twopence, the rest being water, owing to the decline in the purchasing power of money. A movement is now on foot among some of the regular passengers to endeavour to persuade the companies to consent to take their fares neat for the future. ”

“ The way it flew you'd think it was a snowstorm.
"They have him desthroyed," says Mikeen.
"They have," says I, "God be praised!"
At the moment the huntsman leps his harse up on the double beside us; he was phlastered with muck from his hair to his boots.
"What have they out there?" says he, blinkin' through the mud and not knowin' rightly what his hounds were coursin' out before him, whether it would be a stag or a Bengal tiger.
"'Tis her ladyship's Rile Imperial Mascot Goat," says I; "an' God save your honour for she'll have your blood in a bottle for this day's worrk." ”

“ If it's such cratures that bring ye fortune may I die a peaceful death in a poor-house," says I.
"I'm wid ye," says Mikeen, groanin', he bein' spotted like a leopard with bruises by rason of him havin' to comb the mascot's silky hair twice daily, and the quick temper of the baste at the tangles.
The long of a summer the billy stops up at the Castle, archin' his neck at the wurrld and growin' prouder and prouder by dint of the standin' he had with the owld rigiment and the high-feedin' he had from Herself. Faith, 'tis a great delight we servints had of him I'm tellin' ye! ”

“ Sister Baynes came into my room just as I was putting on my out-door uniform and wanted to know how I was spending my two hours off duty. She is full of curiosity about—she calls it interest in—other people's affairs. When I told her I was going out to buy a birthday present she looked rather stern. Said she:—
"The giving of unnecessary presents has become a luxury which few of us nowadays think it right to afford."
I didn't answer her because at the moment I could think of no really adequate reason why Bobbie should have a present, except that I so very much wanted to give him one. ”

“ I says, "drag the mascot out before them; we'll see sport this day."
"Herself—" he begins.
"Hoult your whisht," says I, "and come on." With that we dragged me bowld goat out before the dogs and let go the chain.
The dogs sniffed up the strong blast of ody-koloney and let a yowl out of them like all the banshees in the nation of Ireland, and the billy legged it for his life—small blame to him!
Meself and Mikeen climbed a double to see the sport.
"They have him," says Mikeen. "They have not," says I; "the crature howlds them by two lengths."
"He has doubled on them," says Mikeen ”

“ For a while I hesitated between cigarettes and chocolates, and finally decided on the latter. Bobbie is a perfect pig about sweets. I bought a comfortable-looking box, ornamented with a St. George, improbably attired in khaki, slaying a delightful German dragon clad in blue and a Uhlan helmet. St. George had red hair and a distinct look of Bobbie, which was one reason why I got him.
This business accomplished, I thought I would call on a friend who lives near by. She is middle-aged and rather sad, and spends her time pushing trolleys about a munition works. ”

“ We tripped up me brave goat with the rope, got the bull's collar and chain, and dragged him away towards the pond, him buckin' and ragin' between us like a Tyrone Street lady in the arms of the poliss. To hear the roars he let out of him would turn your hearts cowld as lead, but we held on.
The Saints were wid us; in half-an-hour we had him as wet as an eel, and broke the bottle of ody-koloney over his back.
He was clane mad. "God save us all when he gets that chain off him!" I says. "God save us it is!" says Mikeen, looking around for a tree to shin. ”

“ Who can name a thing? Has he devised a collar stud that cannot be lost? Has he hit upon a way instantly to stop a shaving cut from bleeding? Has he contrived a taxi window that will open when shut or shut when open? No. In all these years he has spared no time for any inventions.
No wonder then that he was found wanting and forced to resign.
A Scot among the Cynics.
"The railway fares are being raised, we are told, to stop pleasure travelling, but it can hardly be imagined that a munition worker going home to spend his week-end with his family is bent on pleasure."—Glasgow Evening News. ”

“ Of these one was the product of his unaided genius; the other the result of the collaboration with his wife.
Let us begin with the individual triumph.
Everyone who has ever stayed under anyone else's roof, from a dine-and-sleep at Windsor Castle to a week in lovely Lucerne, has been confronted, when packing-up time arrived, with the problem of the sponge. No matter how muscular the fingers that wring this article, no matter how thick and costly the rubbered receptacle that holds it, there is always the chance of dampness communicating itself to other things in the bag. ”

“ We are like the Allied Ministers who meet at Paris; we always "arrive at a complete understanding" in all matters of policy. When strict economy was enjoined upon us I moved my desk into the dining-room to save a fire. ”

“ Food is scarce and of a poor quality, in Hungary as elsewhere. The armies we can yet feed, but the home-staying men and the women and children are a growing difficulty. It becomes more and more impossible to provide them with sufficient nourishment. ”

“ In the autumn me bowld mascot gets a wee trifle powerful by dint o' the high-feedin' and the natural nature of the crature. Herself, wid her iligant lady's nose, is afther noticin' it, and she sends wan o' the gerrls to tell meself and Mikeen to wash the baste.
"There will be murdher done this day," says I to the lad, "but 'tis the orders—go get the cart-rope and the chain off the bull-dog, and we'll do it. Faith, it isn't all the bravery that's at the Front," says I.
"That's the true wurrd," says he, rubbin' the lumps on his shins, the poor boy. ”

“ I says to Mikeen, the herd, "to question the workings o' Providence, but were I the Colonel of a rigiment, which I am not, and had to have a mascot, it's not a raparee billy I'd be afther havin', but a nanny, or mebbe a cow, that would step along dacently with the rigiment and bring ye luck, and mebbe a dropeen o' milk for the orficers' tea as well. ”

“ FREDERICK NIVEN is the friendly way in which he contrives to make his readers and himself into a family party. "We must," he writes at the beginning of a chapter in Cinderella of Skookum Greek (NASH) , "get a move on with the story, in case you become more tired of Archer's compound fracture than he was himself." This is by no means the only occasion on which he shows his thoughtfulness for us, and I think it very kind and nice of him. At the same time I will ungraciously admit that the weak point of his story is that it does not move quite fast enough. ”

“ THE FLAPPER.
[Dr. ARTHUR SHADWELL, in the January Nineteenth Century, in his article on "Ordeal by Fire," after denouncing idlers and loafers and shirkers, falls foul "above all" of the young girls called flappers, "with high heels, skirts up to their knees and blouses open to the diaphragm, painted, powdered, self-conscious, ogling: 'Allus adallacked and dizened oot and a 'unting arter the men.'"]
Good Dr. ”

“ When his honour the Colonel took the owld rigiment to France, Herself came home bringin' the rigimental mascot with her. A big white long-haired billy-goat he was, the same.
"I'll not be afther lavin him at the daypo," says Herself; "'tis no place for a domestic animal at all, the language them little drummer-boys uses, the dear knows," says she. ”

“ Not if they know the facts and are faithful to their duty as Ministers of the State. Here and there, no doubt, might be found foolish and ambitious men who would be willing to deceive, first themselves and then their Emperor, as to the true condition of affairs. ”

“ Steggles was once riding behind me down a valley liberally dimpled with shell-holes, further dimples being in process of formation as we rode. I was returning from an O Pip, or Observation Post, and Steggles was carrying a pair of my boots with a rolled puttee stuffed into each. ”

“ According to The Daily Chronicle there are only twenty-three full Generals in the British Army—a total identical with that of the late Cabinet. It is only fair to the army to state that the number is purely a coincidence. ”