Various

“ There are a hundred cures for the drink habit; there is not one for the sugar habit. As I cannot repress the desire, I have had to put all my energy into getting hold of sugar. I noticed some time ago that at these restaurants they give the sugar allowance to all customers who ask for tea or coffee, although perhaps twenty per cent. of them do not take sugar at all. It is these people who supply me with the extra sugar I need. ”

“ Necessity does not make stranger bedfellows than some of the changes brought about by War. Who, for example—and certainly not such a born sun-worshipper as I—would ever have dreamt that a time would come when we in London and the Eastern counties would desire rain and wind with a passionate keenness once reserved solely for fine weather? ”

“ Yes, thank God, the blight of greyness cannot last long; even now the scabrous plague is being burnt up and swept back and overwhelmed by the resistless flood, eager yet cautious, persistent yet fiery, of the blue and the brown. Hideous, pitiable, soul-searing are the scars that it leaves in its mephitic wake, but the cleansing tide of the brown and the blue sweeps on, and the healing wand of time waves over them, and soon the shell-holes and the waste places and the abominations of desolation are covered with little flowers—or would be if it were Spring. ”

“ I do not take kindly to war-time teas. My idea of a tea is several cups of the best China, with three large lumps of sugar in each, and half-a-dozen fancy-cakes with icing sugar all over them and cream in the middle, and just a few cucumber sandwiches for the finish. (This does sound humorous, no doubt, but I seek no credit for it. Humour used to depend upon a sense of proportion. It now depends upon memory. The funniest man in England at the present moment is the man who has the most accurate memory for the things he was doing in the early summer of 1914) . ”

“ There are times when official regulations must be sacrificed to diplomacy. But Cook was in high good humour, and quite determined on doughty deeds. Miss Ropes said no more.
The task of getting a wide cook into a narrow canvas tube proved quite unexpectedly difficult; and, when it was accomplished, so far from sticking out her elbows as brakes, she had to press them close to her sides in order to move at all. With the aid of a friendly pressure applied to the top of her head by Sister she got slowly under way. The chute bulged portentously. ”

“ GILBERT.
We are all very fond of Gilbert. There are, however, one or two things about him which even his best friends will admit make it hard for us at times to remember how much we really love him. Sometimes he seems almost too good to be true. Yet I have known wet horrible days in the trenches when the sight of him coming smiling down the line, exuding efficiency and enthusiasm at every pore, has made his fellow-officers positively dislike him. ”

“ All my life I have been fond of sugar. Before the war I took always nine lumps to a cup of tea. (It was my turn to raise my hat.) By a severe course of self-repression I have reduced it to seven, but I cannot get below that. ”

“ Having taken cover only in Lower Robert Street, which is open to all, I cannot with any personal knowledge speak of the camaraderie of private basements; but I suppose that that exists and is another of the War's byproducts. I take it that, in the event of a sudden alarm, no householder with a cellar would be so inhuman as to refuse admittance to a stranger, and already probably a myriad new friendships and not a few engagements have resulted. Our own camaraderie is admirable. The federation of the barrage breaks down every obstacle ”

“ When, further, her detestable lover, seeking change and fearing the financial lash of his properly indignant parent, terminates the arrangement, even an observer of real life can guess that her return to her rightful lord and master must entail disagreeables; but only a reader well brazened in modern fiction could expect Don Juan promptly to make love to and marry the husband's sister without a word of apology to anyone. ”

“ Yet so it is. By reason of that foolish invention of flying we now, when we go to the window in the morning and lift the blind, are dashed and darkly thoughtful if no sky of grey scudding misery meets our gaze. ”

“ No one knows what depth of meaning lies in that little word for our brave fellows, what intensity of hopes and fears and well-nigh intolerable yearnings it awakens beneath the cheery insouciance of their exteriors ”

“ Hence we all talk; and sometimes we sing too—choruses of the moment, for the most part, in one of which the depth of our affection for our maternal relative is measured and regulated by the floridity of the roses growing on her porch. ”

“ I told Agnes. "Green sateen collar to match the buttons—"
"And for the wristbands," said Agnes, catching my enthusiasm.
"And for the wristbands," I agreed; "but," I added, "not at the ankles. That would make the other people in the street expect me to dance to them, and I don't know how to."
And now the good work is complete. Toggle and cinch perform their proud functions, and I sleep undisturbed by Arctic nightmares, for I have substituted green ties for the stoneware buttons which reduced my vitality by absorbing heat. My only trouble is my increasing reluctance to rise in the morning. ”

“ It happened many years ago, when the War was young and the Bosch comparatively aggressive; when our big guns fired once every other Sunday and we lived precarious lives in holes in the ground. Our Brigadier, a conscientious soldier of the old school, was dodging round our line of trenches, and had just reached the sector allotted to my company, which was also Gilbert's, when the distant buzz that generally means an aeroplane overhead made itself distinctly heard. ”

“ Well, out of respect for O'Dwyer I looked after it as far as it would allow me, naturally expecting he'd come over and claim it—but he didn't. On the fourth day, after it had made a light breakfast off a bombardier's ear and kicked a gap in a farrier, I got absolutely fed up, turned the damn cannibal loose and gave it a cut with a whip for godspeed. It made off due east, cavorting and snorting until it reached the tank-track; there it stopped and picked a bit of grass. Presently along comes a tank, proceeding to the fray, and gives the mule a poke in the rear. ”

“ Like so many other authors she has succumbed to the lure of the War-novel. There may be a public for tales of this kind, but I have not yet read one that approaches artistic success. Here we are spared nothing. Sir Mark Forsyth goes to France in the early days, is first of all reported "missing, believed killed," and then officially reported "killed." Of course he turns up again, but such a physical wreck that the minx whom he was to have married breaks off the engagement. Naturally the sweet girl, friend of Mark's childhood, undertakes to fill the gap. ”

“ When an unstable young wife, getting tired of a pedantic husband in the way so familiar to students of novels, goes off with a companion more to her taste, anyone can foresee trouble, or what would there be to write about? ”

“ The mule lashes out, catching the tank in the chest, and then goes on with his grazing without looking round, leaving the tank for dead, as by all human standards it should have been, of course. But instead of being dead the box of tricks ups and gives the donk another butt and moves on. That roused the mule properly. He closed his eyes and laid into the tank for dear life ”

“ Much is expected, too, of the large dairy companies, who, by their control of vast numbers of heavy milk-cans, are in a peculiarly favoured position. By the manipulation of these vessels on a stone floor a very complete imitation of a raid can be produced. A good deal, of course, can be done by any ordinary householder. "I have had great fun," one correspondent writes, "with a very deliberate and heavily-striking Dutch clock, which I have lately put against my party-wall. My neighbour's family frequently jump up and run for the basement. ”

“ Karl is really too good for this world. He objects to atrocities and refuses at the risk of his own life to shoot innocent Belgian villagers. Being imprisoned, he escapes by means of a secret sliding panel and an underground passage which leads him, not immediately, but after many vicissitudes, to America. ”

“ But it was Monk we saw later. He wormed his long corpse into "Mon Repos" and sat on Albert Edward's bed laughing like a tickled hyena. "Funniest thing on earth," he spluttered. "A mule strayed into my lines t'other night and refused to leave. It was a rotten beast, a holy terror; it could kick a fly off its ears and bite a man in half. I don't mind admitting it played battledore and what's-'is-name with my organisation for a day or two, but out of respect for O'Dwyer, blackguard though he is, I ..."
"Oh, so it was O'Dwyer's mule?" ”

“ Sister clutched at the top of the chute, while Dutton hung manfully on to the other end.
"Don't struggle," said Sister in a stern professional voice. "Keep your arms still, and you'll come down all right." A muffled screaming and a dangerously increased agitation of the chute was the only reply. Cook had quite lost her head and was having violent hysterics. Three or four of us raced upstairs to aid Sister in keeping the top end of the apparatus from jerking free, while several more went to the assistance of the flustered Dutton. ”

“ To begin with, experts in anagrams will not fail to notice that the names ALGERNON SWINBURNE and W. ROBERTSON NICOLL contain practically the same number of letters—absolutely the same if SWINBURNE is spelt without an "e"—and that the forenames of both end in "-on," as does also the concluding syllable of WATTS-DUNTON. The fact that the Editor of The British Weekly has never published any poems over his own name only tends to confirm the theory, as the argument conclusively establishes. ”

“ This is history, please remember, not fiction. I wanted—I am obliged to say it—pyjamas for winter wear. I know all about pyjamas for summer wear; what I wanted was pyjamas for winter wear, and I decided that Agnes should make them. For years I have been trying to get proper pyjamas—by which I mean pyjamas properly made—but the haberdasher always smiles depreciation and tells me that the goods he offers me are what are always worn. Quite so; but what I say is that out of bed and for the purpose of having your photograph taken Trade pyjamas are all right ”

“ This consists of escaping from upper windows by means of precarious canvas chutes. The only people exempted from this ceremony are Mrs. Ropes—who watches with great delight from a safe distance—and Sister, who stands sternly at the top to make sure (a) that those patients who don't want to go down do go down, and (b) that those patients who do want to go down don't go down more than once. No excuses are taken. The fixed ration is one slither per chute per person. ”

“ The trick apparently consists in finding a man with a pot of tea and giving him a sovereign to go round the corner and buy a ham sandwich, the thief meanwhile offering to hold the pot of tea. When the owner returns the tea has, of course, vanished.
The increased consumption of bread, says Sir ARTHUR YAPP, is due to the 9d. loaf. It would just serve us right if bread cost 2s. 6d. a pound and there wasn't any, like everything else.
"It is all a matter of taste," says a correspondent of The Daily Mail, "but I think parsnips are now at their best." ”

“ His farm-bred Sadie, a Buffalo shirt-packer, classifies men by the sizes of their shirts, has no use for any swain with a chest measurement under forty, and eventually in a most original way finds her hero in Mister 44 (METHUEN) , an enormous Canadian engineer and sportsman. She is no chicken herself and has a passion to be free of the city and out in the great open. Sadie is more than big ”

“ Probably one of those "strained relations" we so often read about.
"My Correspondent's bona fides are above suspicion."—"The Clubman" in "The Pall Matt Gazette."
One good fide deserves another, but of course the more the merrier.
Aunt Maria. "DO YOU KNOW I ONCE ACTUALLY SAW THE KAISER RIDING THROUGH THE STREETS OF LONDON AS BOLD AS BRASS. IF I'D KNOWN THEN WHAT I KNOW NOW I'D HAVE TOLD A POLICEMAN." INVITATION.
If you will come and stay with us you shall not want for ease ”

“ Humour of the intentional kind has, of course, no place in the author's scheme. How remote is its banishment you may judge when I tell you that the Divine message is represented as given to mankind in the form of a wonderful play, which instantly achieves world-wide fame, being performed by no fewer than fifty companies in America alone. The problem (to name but one) of the resulting struggle between plenary inspiration and the conditions of a fit-up tour is only another proof of my contention that there are more things in heaven and earth than can be treated in realistic fiction, and that Mr. ”

“ Provided that no scarcity of gas for other purposes is caused the Government see no objection to its use for the propulsion of motor-cars. On receiving this information Mr. PEMBERTON BILLING at once ordered a Zeppelin attachment to his famous torpedo-shaped car. No other gas-consumer will suffer, as he is prepared to keep the apparatus inflated from his own retorts. ”