Various

“ But the whole tedious routine of the bee's domestic pottering day is an open book to us. Ask yourself, which would you rather do, be able to collect honey and put it in a suitable receptacle, or be able to let yourself down from the top floor to the basement by a silken rope produced out of your tummy, and then climb up it again when you want to go upstairs, just winding up the rope inside you? ”

“ Lately we had occasion to consider the place of the grasshopper in modern politics. Now let us consider the place of the spider in our social life.
It seems to me that the spider is the most accomplished and in some ways the most sensible insect we have in these parts. In my opinion a great deal too much fuss has been made about the bee. She is a knowing little thing, but the spider is her superior in many ways. Yet no one seems to write books or educational rhymes about the spider. ”

“ The real charge against the spider is that he doesn't make any food for us. As for the virtue and nobility of the bee, I don't see it. The only way in which she is able to accumulate all that honey at all is by massacring the unfortunate males by the thousand as soon as she conveniently can, a piece of Prussianism which may be justified on purely material grounds, but is scarcely consistent with her high reputation for morality and lovingkindness. ”

“ Can we not get a little more of the simplicity of spider life into this hectic world of ours? In these latitudes the spider lives only for a single season. "The young emerge from the cocoon in the early spring, grow through the summer and reach maturity in the early autumn. The sexes then pair and perish soon after the female has constructed her cocoon." ”

“ We all have our place in the world. Let carping critics say what they please, whether it is Dorothy in her gay gown or Liberty in her revolutionary wear, our showy American cousins, our well-beloved Scotch relations, or our Persian guests—they are all welcome, all beautiful. ”

“ So that it comes to this: if spiders are useless because they eat each other, the bees do much the same thing (only wholesale) , but it makes them commercially useful. The bee therefore we place upon a pinnacle of respectability, but the spider we despise. ”

“ I re-settled myself at my desk, smiling a little cynically. How long would the lesson last? Then I happened to glance towards the mantelpiece, beside which Ursula had been standing. There, hastily propped against the clock, was that detestable photograph. It still quivered in the movement of release, as though shaking its shoulders, settling down palpably for another decade. With an uncontrollable impulse I leapt up, seized the abomination and, flinging it on the floor, ground it to powder with my heel.
In one word, the anti-squatting campaign had definitely begun.
A. E.
Navvy. ”

“ And lastly there is the Medium school, which, choosing the moment when the wasp is busily engaged, presses it down gently and firmly into the marmalade, so that the last spoonfuls of the dish are not so much a fruit product as a kind of entomological preserve. The last way, I think, will be the State way of dealing with wasps, and a reward will probably be offered for the stings of all wasps embalmed on Coalition lines.
The electorate has stuck to the Government through the Peace Treaty, through Mesopotamia, through Ireland and through coal. ”

“ The spider can lower itself from the drawing-room ceiling to the floor by a silken thread produced out of itself. Still more marvellous, he can climb up the same thread to the ceiling when he is bored, winding up the thread inside him as he goes, and so making pursuit impossible. What can the bee do to equal that? ”

“ I was never more serious in my life. This speckled travesty, this photographic mummy, is but one example out of many. I do not know whether other homes resemble ours in the same tendency towards the mausoleum. ”

“ Contemporary novelists have even placed on record cases in which the male has "waited for hours in her vicinity before venturing to come to close quarters;" but too much attention must not be paid to these imaginative accounts. If I have said enough to secure that in future a [pg 117] little more kindliness and respect will be shown to the spider in the nurseries of this great Empire, and a little less of it wasted on the bee, I have not misspent my time. ”

“ Laurette Messimé was quite hanging her head about it all. "I live in harmony with all my neighbours," she simpered. "Ah, yes," flaunted Lady Gay, in that unblushing manner of hers, "that's very easy to do for colourless people." At this Caroline Testout turned quite pale and stuttered, "Well, Dorothy does scream so." ”

“ If it could be shown that the bee consciously collected all that honey with the idea that we should annex it there might be something to be said for her on moral grounds; but nobody pretends that. Now look at the spider. We are told that as a commercial product spider-silk has been found to be equal if not superior to the best silk spun by the Lepidopterous larvæ, with whom, of course, you are familiar. "But the cannibalistic propensities of spiders, making it impossible to keep more than one in a single receptacle ... ”

“ How delicious! No winter; no bother about coal; no worry about the children's education; just one glorious summer of sport, one wild summer of fly-catching and midge-eating, a romantic, not to say dangerous wooing, a quiet wedding in the autumn, dump the family in some nice unfurnished cocoon—and perish. Is there nothing to be said for that? How different from the miserable bee, which just goes on and on, worrying about posterity, working and working, fussing about....
Yet all our lives are modelled on the bee's.
A. P. H.
Mr. ”

“ I can see cram and diaphragm and possibly jam coming very soon. But we must get on.
The spider is like the bee in this respect, that the male seems to have a most rotten time. For one thing he is nearly always about two sizes smaller than the female. Owing to that and to what The Encyclopædia Britannica humorously describes as "the greater voracity" of the female (there is a lot of quiet fun in The Encyclopædia Britannica) , he is a very brave spider who makes a proposal of marriage. ”

“ Cooks and housewives will be condemned either to make State marmalade or to make no marmalade at all. Personally I am inclined to think that the President of the Board of Agriculture will go further than this. I think that encouragement will be given to those who take the State Marmalade course to follow it up with a subsidiary or finishing course of wasp treatment.
And in wasp treatment also there are three schools. There is what is called the Churchill school, which hits out right and left with an infuriated spoon. ”

“ THE COUNTER-IRRITANT
Most men have a hobby. Timbrell-Timson's is to bear on his narrow shoulders the burden of Middle Europe. He calls it Mittel-Europa. Lately he has been sharing his burden with me.
"You know," he said, frowning—he always frowns, because of the burden—"I am rather uneasy about the Czecho-Slovaks." ”

“ To this repute Linda Condon (Heinemann) will certainly add. In many ways I incline to think it, or parts of it, the best work that this unusual artist has yet done. The development of Linda, in the hateful surroundings of an American "hotel-child," through her detached and observant youth to a womanhood austere, remote, inspired only by the worship of essential beauty, is told with an exquisite rightness of touch that is a continual delight. ”

“ My beautiful, there is no one like you. They want me to marry the daughter of a royal house, but if you will say "Yes" I will defy them. We will be married by the Archbishop, who marries and buries so beautifully; but I shall never need burying, because those who marry you never die. ”

“ A thorough search for the Sacred Principles of Liberalism, which are said to be concealed somewhere in the basement, will be undertaken as soon as the property changes hands.
There is no truth in the report that Mr. Lloyd George, after listening to the grand howl of the Wolf Cubs at Olympia, declared that it was a very tame affair for anyone used to listening to Mr. Devlin.
"Kangaroos and wallabies," says a Colonial journalist, "are about the only things that the Australian sportsman can chase." Members of the M.C.C. team declare that they expect to change all that. ”

“ Drall confided to me, "to scribble a testimonial to Lemonbeer. It will kind of break the spell, and it wouldn't be Maurice if he didn't turn out a perfect gem of literary composition. I know my Lemonbeer is really good and I know that Maurice is extremely appreciative. Maurice is under a spell. It must be broken. If he can write a complete testimonial he will easily finish all those beginnings of his." ”

“ The Lushborough road is good and free from obstruction as far as Great Boundingley, but from Chatback to Wrothley the conditions are unfavourable. The bridge one mile south of the former place has been occupied by a strong force of unfriendly natives, and several cases of tarring have been reported. There is, however, an alternative route viâ Boozeley, but great caution is advised in passing through Wrothley, passengers being recommended to provide themselves with a good supply of loose metal before entering the village, where most of the houses are protected with iron shutters. ”

“ I think you will agree that the spider has it. It is hard enough, goodness knows, to wind up an ordinary ball of string so that it will go into the string-box properly. What one would do if one had to put it in one's bread-box I can't think. When my children grow up, instead of learning
"How doth the little busy bee ..." ”

“ But no route at present offers more favourable or exhilarating opportunities to the high-minded excursionist than the main Gath road from Scrapston to Kinlarry. Excellent sport is afforded just outside Stillminster, where Sir John Goodfellow's greenhouses are within easy bottle-throw of the road and furnish a splendid target. ”

“ For thirty-five minutes I held T.-T. in his chair (may the Abyssinian gods forgive me!) . After the first three minutes he forgot his burden and never a word spake he.
Then I released him with a final warning against putting any faith at all in Gran'slâm, the Abyssinian Assistant Foreign Secretary, and as we parted I said gratefully, "It has been a pleasure to talk to such a sympathetic listener."
I don't think T.-T. really believes even now in the Swarthy Peril, but the counter-irritant has done its work. ”

“ But neither he nor anybody else could say how courts-martial, which are "to act on the ordinary rules of evidence," will be successful in bringing criminals to justice if witnesses refuse to come forward.
Mr. T. P. O'Connor re-delivered the anti-coercion speech which he has been making off and on for the last forty years. Mr. Devlin was a little more up-to-date, for he introduced a reference to the Belfast riots and drew from the Chief Secretary an assurance that the Bill would be as applicable to Ulster as to the rest of Ireland. ”

“ I am very sure, as the Prime Minister would say, that things are about to happen in preserved fruit products; things will become very much worse and very much sterner in jam. And if in jam why then also in jelly and in marmalade. Even at this moment in the offices of the Board of Agriculture there are a number of clerks, I suppose, sitting with schedules in front of them, something like this ”

“ Thus Sir Bertram Falk, who was concerned because Naval officers received no special marriage allowance, was specifically assured by Sir James Craig that the Admiralty will not prevent men from marrying. ”

“ It is said that the fellow intends printing this testimonial on his letter-paper.
A man knocked down by a racing motorist in New York is reported to have had both legs and an arm fractured, several ribs broken, and other injuries. Motorists in this country incline to the theory that it was the work of an amateur. ”

“ There will descend on all living things the blight of eternal cod."
Scotch Paper.
Although the danger is not immediate it deserves the serious consideration of the Food Controller.
[pg 106]
SQUISH. (Being some notes on a bye-path in politics.)
The Board of Agriculture has been biding its time. In the fierce light of publicity which has been beating of late upon Mr. Lloyd George, Mr. Winston Churchill and Sir Eric Geddes the attempt of this rustic Ministry to assert itself has passed almost unnoticed. Our gaze has been fixed upon the London railway termini, upon Warsaw and upon Belfast ”

“ Still, the owners would work the Bill for what it was worth, and hoped the miners would do the same. Lord Haldane said that was just what the miners had announced their intention of not doing unless they were given a great deal more power than the Bill proposed. But this lack of enthusiasm in no way damped Lord Peel's ardour. Indeed he observed that he had "never introduced a Bill that was received with any sort of enthusiasm." Mollified by this engaging candour the Peers gave the Bill a Second Reading.
I am glad to record another example of Government economy. To Mr. ”