Various

“ Angela seated on what is known, I believe, in upholstering circles as a humpty, while Peggy lay on her tummy on the floor, pencil in hand and a sheet of paper before her; she was chewing the pencil with the ruminating air of one who awaits inspiration. I myself occupied the armchair.
"You know," said Angela presently, "I think Mélisande has seemed worried about something the last few days. I do hope the poor dear isn't bothering about rabies. One so often hears of people actually producing a disease merely by thinking a lot about it. ”

“ Six runs are needed and I am the last man. The bowler against me is a demon and I am dead out of practice and by no means fond of being hit on the body. He begins his run towards the wicket, and the ball leaves his terrible long swinging arm and comes towards me like a shell. I raise my bat, get it on the half-volley right in the middle, hit it clean over the Pavilion for six, and the match is won. ”

“ He was called upon, like many another harmless Staff-officer, to give up his simple comforts and to face hardship and suffering for a scrap of paper (authorising him to travel to Manchester) . At first McTurtle was content to let the younger men of the Base make a stand against the aggression of the front line. Being the only support of an aged Colonel and no mere youth, he left it to the reckless A.P.M.'s, the dashing Camp Commandants and the carefree dare-devil Field-Cashiers to repel the infantry and gunners. ”

“ GOUVERNEUR MORRIS should have the benefit of her criticism, since my own is distinctly less favourable. Mr. MORRIS showed signs at one time of being able to write a first-class novel of adventure, but he abandoned this field for a more lucrative appeal to the Great American Bosom, whose taste, if I may say so without endangering the League of Nations, is more in harmony with my landlady's than with mine. His latest hero is one of those magnificent fellows whom no woman can resist—or so they tell him. ”

“ We were about to readmit the prisoner, his escort and the imaginary public when my partner in the suppression of crime was struck by an idea.
"Look here," asked Major Blenkin, "what about the moral aspect?"
I hesitate to argue with Blenkin about moral questions, on which he speaks with authority. I therefore awaited his next remark.
"The moral aspect," Blenkin went on, "is most important. I intend to impress this fellow. I shall tell him that if he had been a French peasant and had offered a bribe to a German officer he would have been put against a wall and shot. Do you agree?" ”

“ I always wonder why the captain does not begin in the Pavilion, but he does not. He comes straight to the ring. Every moment he is drawing nearer and no one has offered himself; and then at last he gets to me and I stand up and say that Kent is my county and I can play a bit and would like to help. ”

“ What the side is I cannot clearly tell; all I know is that it is my own county, I mean the county from which I come—say Kent—and the match is at Old Trafford or Bramall Lane, against either Lancashire or Yorkshire. But the important thing is that my side is a man short. This man either has been taken ill or has had to go away because of a bereavement. I am not clear as to that, but he is not there, anyway, and unless a substitute can be found Kent will be at a disadvantage and may lose. ”

“ A Trades Union has recently been formed to further the interests and raise the status of all who are in receipt of Government unemployment pay. It is hoped eventually to obtain a charter, and thus give professional standing to those employed in receiving such pay. In the meantime, however, the Union is working on orthodox labour lines, and arrangements are practically completed for calling a national strike of unemployed to compel the Authorities to increase the amount of the grant by one hundred per cent. ”

“ Ludwig Shyster, of the North Boreland Golf Club, suggests that the tin in the hole should be highly magnetized and the ball coated with a metallic substance so that it might be attracted into the hole. Golf, he contends, is a recreation, and the true aim of golf legislation should be to make the game easier, not more difficult; to attract the largest possible number of players and so to keep up the green-fees and pay a decent salary to secretaries and professionals. ”

“ Blenkin bridled indignantly. It was on the tip of his tongue to charge me with being a pro-German. He controlled himself and rang a bell. "I shall hold to my own opinion," he remarked with some asperity.
The prisoner, his escort and the interpreter were marched in. Adolf Hans Pumpenheim created the customary diversion by turning to the right on the command, "Left turn," and the sergeant-major made the customary comments, undeterred by the prisoner's ignorance of English. The imaginary public filed in and occupied the vacant stools. ”

“ In the event of a strike each member of the Union will formally week by week refuse to accept his or her money, and it is believed that the Government will quickly be brought to its knees. No special steps are to be taken against traitors to the cause who accept work. The social ostracism thereby incurred is felt to be a sufficient deterrent.
A regrettable impasse has been reached in the dispute between The Amalgamated Society of Trades Union Leaders and the Trades Unions. ”

“ This is an intimate study, inspired throughout by a cold fury of purpose that can be felt on every page, of the destruction of a young man's spirit in the insensate machinery of modern war. There is no other plot, no side issues, no relief. ”

“ It was merely a resident going to a fancy-dress dance.
A medical paper states that if a man was bitten by a rabid cow he would probably go mad and start grazing in the nearest meadow. Hence the name of the "Pasteur" treatment.
A dentist in a suburb that shall be nameless has a case of samples attached to the outside of his front door, with an inscription inviting people to choose a set of teeth before entering. Surely it is bad manners for anyone to pick his teeth in public.
Some distinguished players have declared in favour of larger holes for golf. ”

“ You would think the match was over. So it would be on any ordinary ground and under ordinary conditions, and particularly so if that umpire in the Sussex and Somerset match the other day were officiating. But he is not, and this is a dream. What happens is that the Kent captain, instead of returning to the Pavilion, stops and talks to the other captain and then he leaves the pitch and begins to walk towards the ring. When he reaches the ring, some way from me, he begins to ask loudly, 'Is there a Kent man here who can play at all and would help us out?' I can hear him at first only faintly ”

“ Judges are only human. I cannot state that his innocence was presumed.
The evidence was brief. A corporal of foot police, after examining the articles produced in court, pronounced them to be indubitably two tins of corned beef and a cake of soap, and further declared that he had found them in the prisoner's house, no troops being at that time billeted upon him. Second-Lieutenant Robinson deposed that upon his arrival the prisoner had thrust a fifty-mark note into his hand, accompanying the action with gestures and grimaces suggestive of bribery. ”

“ McTurtle is a Staff-officer. A famous Atlantic liner dumped him at Salonica in 1915, and when the first infantrymen panted through the town in search of non-existent billets McTurtle was to be seen in the window of a villa giving bird-seed to his canary. At Salonica it is not considered good form to ask openly what a Staff-officer's job is, but he allowed friends to gather that he had an indirect connection with that fine old regiment, the Macedonian Labour Corps. ”

“ In Committee on the Bill for enabling women to become Justices of the Peace Lord STRACHIE moved to restrict the privilege to those who have "attained the age of thirty years." The LORD CHANCELLOR strongly resisted the limitation on the ground that the Government are pledged to establish "equality between the sexes." ”

“ Thursday, May 29th—A constitutional crisis is impending on the question whether the MINISTER OF HEALTH should have one Parliamentary Secretary or two; the Commons demand two; the Lords will not allow more than one, even though tempted by Lord CURZON with the bribe that the second shall sit in the Upper House. ”

“ In calm hours of reflection, rather, when the mellow sunlight streams into the room and, instead of the dull gray buildings opposite, you catch a mental glimpse of green tree-tops waving in the wind, and hear, above the rumbling of the busy 'buses, the buzzes ... ”

“ We were discussing our favourite dreams and prepared to listen.
"It is always," he went on, "the same—a cricket match: and the older I get and less able to play cricket, the oftener I have it. It is a real match, you must understand—first-class cricket, with thousands of spectators and excitement ”

“ My career is at an end. I am a broken man."
"What have you done?"
"I couldn't help it," he sobbed. "We sat there for an age, an eternity, unable to speak, unable to move, unable to act. At length my nerve gave way and I—I've pulled all her teeth out."
THE UNEMPLOYMENT SCANDAL.
[The evening papers have lately published some striking incidents regarding the struggle for existence that is undergone by certain gentlemen who are in receipt of the Unemployment Allowance.] ”

“ At Itea, on the Gulf of Corinth, the party was ordered to return owing to a German offensive in France. McTurtle went back under chloroform. A week later it made another attempt, but was stopped by the Austrian offensive in Italy. McTurtle went back under morphia. At the third attempt it got through, but without McTurtle.
His nerve is gone, and he is marooned at Salonica. He cannot face the overland route, and he cannot get home all the way by sea just yet. In spite of all his endeavours he cannot become a naturalised Greek and stay there, because of linguistic difficulties. ”

“ There are still twenty-three wars in progress, declares a Sunday contemporary. The belief is rapidly gaining ground that several of them are being allowed to continue merely to spite Colonel WEDGWOOD.
Cricket, we are constantly told, must be brightened. ”

“ Comrade Snooks informed our representative that he was conducting negotiations on behalf of the employers, that is to say the ordinary members of the Trades Unions. He stated with a full sense of responsibility that if the Leaders went on strike all the resources of the Unions would be employed against them. On the whole the Leaders had good berths—easy work and high pay. Their demands were becoming absolutely unreasonable and must be opposed. ”

“ Unless the rank and file of the Unions were prepared to meet the Leaders' demands a strike was certain. He shrank from imagining what was likely to happen if the Trades Unions were left leaderless. The responsibility, however, did not rest with the Leaders. They had made every possible concession. A four-hours' day and a salary of one thousand pounds per annum was the minimum which would be considered. ”

“ You see now why the match has to be played so far away from home. If it were Kent v. Middlesex at Lord's, for example, there would be loads of Kentish men on the ground. But not so many up in the North. ”

“ It appears that the Burglars' Trade Union, not to be outdone, are about to put in a demand for shorter sentences.
"Single women," says a scientific journal, "live on an average ten years longer than married women." ”

“ The infantry and gunners, outnumbering the Staff by at least two to one, were gaining positions on each leave-party. The issue was trembling in the balance, and McTurtle answered the call. With set lips he sought the nearest orderly-room sergeant. ”

“ It follows that in trying to identify all the persons to whom he may or may not have been introduced in the previous pages, and all the phrases in inverted commas he has certainly seen somewhere else sometime, the truly diligent reader will be kept faithfully at his task—a pleasant one possibly, but just a thought too much like hard work to be quite entertaining in a novel. ”

“ Punch concerning the suggestions put forward by famous golfers with the view of modifying the predominant influence exercised by putting in golf. A crisis is rapidly being reached and Government intervention may be invoked any day. ”

“ Meanwhile the War has happened along and given everyone who needed it an opportunity of redeeming his Past, and, as the hero is getting old and has had a nasty crash in an aeroplane, it seems possible that an era of comparative continence has really set in. ”

“ EUSTACE MILES. Then followed Prince Ongtong and his choir, superbly gowned in their flowing sarongs, wearing their long Papuan pampooties and followed in turn by a group of instrumentalists playing on conchs, nose-flutes and a species of [pg 447] mouth-organ closely resembling the jew's-harp, but much larger and more penetrating in its quality. The crowds in the street were enormous; hundreds of strong women fainted, and the casualties are estimated at upwards of five thousand. ”

“ This is all the more to be regretted as arrangements had been made for a competition between the Solomon Islanders and the Czecho-Slovakian singers, at which Lord ASKWITH had undertaken to adjudicate. All hope however of tracing the missing party has not yet been given up, and a wireless message received at Marconi House on Sunday night states that the Ringwood police had arrested a partially-clad foreigner in the neighbourhood of the Rufus-stone.
A GENERAL STRIKE ON DERBY DAY. FROM OUR GALLERY OF INCONCEIVABLE HORRORS. Chance for the Homeless. ”