Various

“ There is nothing much gloomier than a bath by candle-light, except perhaps a bath in the dark. Hundreds, however, of both sorts are endured in this hotel.
The more brazen or the more timid simply walk into the bathroom fully dressed during the day, carrying a number of dirty golf-balls in their hands, and towels in their pockets and sponges up their sleeves, and issue later fully dressed with clean white golf-balls in their hands. ”

“ We explored the estate from the dog-kennel to the loggia for sleeping out "under the stars;" from the pergola to the library; from the sundial to the telephone, "the only one for miles;" and as we walked between the purple and mauve Michaelmas daisies in her long herbaceous borders, with Red Admiral butterflies among the myriad little clean blossoms, she said how odd it was that some people have the gift of attracting friends and others not; and what a strange thing it is that where one person has to toil to make a circle others are automatically surrounded by nice creatures ”

“ The Korban Bath Rules will probably remain unwritten for many a day, but I earnestly hope that before next summer the traditions and etiquette of bath-warfare as between individual hotel-visitors will be codified and issued in an intelligible form. At the moment the most extraordinary confusion prevails, and no one can tell whether any particular stratagem will be hailed with applause as a bold and legitimate operation of war or universally condemned as a barefaced piece of bath-hoggery. ”

“ Brock. "Lady Cranstone," she continued to me, "is kindness itself. She makes all the difference between loneliness and—and content."
Lady Cranstone picked a rose and pinned it in her monumental bosom. "I don't know that I had anything in particular to say," she remarked. "I chanced to be passing and I merely looked in; but since I am here perhaps you would allow me to use your telephone—"
Mrs. Brock beamed her delighted acquiescence and the frigate sailed on. "You've no idea," said Mrs. Brock, "what a friendly crowd there is in these parts. ”

“ In all the lengthy annals of this Government, vacillation between weakness and tyranny has never proved so disastrous as it is proving in Ireland to-day, and the conduct of that unhappy country's affairs is now plunged in a chaos so profoundly chaotic that it has become a gross misuse of language to call them affairs at all. ”

“ My dear Charles,—Essential to that millennium which our restless revolutionaries are after is your head on a charger and my head on a charger; provided both heads are present it may be the same charger for all they care. When you think of the importance which we of the detested middle classes attach to our heads and the regrettable violence we might exhibit towards whoever called at our houses to collect them, then it seems to me you must confess to a sneaking admiration for the bravery of the turbulent minority in attacking so big a problem. ”

“ I went into the matter of bathrooms pretty carefully a few months ago, but since I have been in this hotel I see that there are one or two aspects of hotel bathing which still require attention.
To begin with, there is the question of the Korban or free bath. It is, of course, a scandal that a bath should be an extra, and an eighteen-penny one at that. After all, what is the bathroom for? We are not charged extra for smoking in the smoking-room or drawing in the drawing-room; why should we be bled for bathing in the bathroom? ”

“ There never was such a down-at-heel and unscrupulous young ruffian of a mongrel terrier as Livo, nor one that more completely convinced people that he was a gentleman of blood and a pure-souled spiritualist.
Of course there were heaps of other pets as well, but just as they seemed about to reach that stage of human intelligence so earnestly desired by their young master they all suddenly died, even as Alfred, the last of a long list, gave up the ghost yesterday.
Alfred was a trout. Not your ordinary fly-jumping kind of trout, because there is never anything ordinary about John's pets. ”

“ Even in the present days of shamelessness and crime there are few men who care to confess openly that they have angrily rattled at the bathroom door. If you said sheepishly, "It is Smith" or "Thompson" or "Lord Bumble," a heavy silence fell, broken only by those gentle watery sounds which it is so maddening to hear from without. When her husband arrived and answered the challenge with "It is I, Arthur," sounds of feverish activity [pg 277] were heard within, and a new bath was immediately turned on. ”

“ I could not understand why Elizabeth felt justified in paying sixpence per week for a benefit fraught with so little ultimate joy to herself. But she is the sort of girl that can never resist the back-door tout. She is constantly being persuaded to buy something for which she pays a small weekly sum. ”

“ The grand total of sixteen pounds, nine shillings and eight-pence three-farthings shows a magnificent spirit, but wouldn't keep much more than a couple of square inches of the front page alive for more than one day. Reverting, then, to the more pressing question of the removal of our heads, who is paying for the operation?
He is a heavy-built octopus sort of man of about forty-seven; a red cheery complexion, rather more fat than muscle, long grey hair tending to curl at the extremes, and followed about by a lady who acts as his secretary, calls him "Master" and adores the ground he walks on. ”

“ It began to trickle back to me accompanied by the regrets of editors; and to writers the regrets of editors are the most poignant in the world.
The situation was saved by the most up-to-date tout of the whole back-door tribe. He persuaded Elizabeth to go in for Spiritualism. Do not misunderstand me. You can be a Spiritualist and also keep a gramophone, but, if you are Elizabeth, you cannot keep the two running at the same time if you must pay a shilling per week for each. ”

“ To those who shrug their shoulders and say that a series of kaleidoscopic changes in Irish administration would never be approved by the good sense of the British electorate I can only urge that it is precisely this attitude of intolerance towards and ignorance of Irish psychology which has rendered our behaviour to Ireland for so many centuries a by-word not only throughout Europe but the whole civilised world and the United States of America. ”

“ I should mention that it is a perfectly legitimate manœuvre to get your bath put down to somebody else if you can do it; and the crack lady-player usually wraps herself in an unobtrusive bath-wrap, shrouds her head, modestly conceals her face, slips into a friend's room to borrow some Crème-Limon and, after an interval, rushes noisily out of the friend's room to her bath, which, with any luck, is charged to her friend's account.
The beginner at the game contents himself with less complicated ruses. Sometimes he has his bath late at night, when the sentries have been taken off ”

“ At the same time this practice does provide the visitor with the wholesome sport of Korban bathing. The object of the game is, of course, to have as many baths as possible which are not put down in your bill; and many are the stratagems which are employed.
The true sportsman attempts the feat just before dinner, because at that time there are sentries posted in every corridor. Ostensibly they are maids waiting to assist any lady who has a crisis while dressing, but no real pretence is made that they are there for any other purpose than to charge you for as many baths as possible. ”

“ When she sought my opinion I strongly advised the séances, which I said were cheap at the price; indeed I thought they were when the gramophone departed.
It was now Elizabeth's turn to become unnerved. She has a mind that is peculiarly open to impressions, and communion with the spirits unbalanced her. She justified her expenditure of a shilling weekly by placing the utmost faith in them. ”

“ Recently, for example, an extremely courteous, not to say gallant, old gentleman was severely lectured by a lady for digging himself in on the mat and maintaining his position there till she emerged. She stated with, I think, considerable force that she had passed the age when a lady likes to be seen coming out of a bathroom with disordered locks; she also said that he was ruining her chance of a Korban bath by drawing attention to the fact that there was somebody inside. ”

“ The only solution I see is the Sponge System, by which every competitor puts down a sponge, as one puts down a ball at the first tee. In this way definite claims can be staked out in rotation without congestion of the avenues of approach. I hope this system will be generally adopted next summer and, if it is used in conjunction with my Progress Indicator (which shows by a moving needle what stage the person bathing has reached) , it ought to work very smoothly. But there must be no hanky-panky, no sharp practice with caddies; every sponge must be put down by one of the players in person. ”

“ She has no soul. She will never be a great authoress. The Cup must remain in Oregon, and Priscilla will never tell the world how the wind did go walking in the field, talking to the earth voices, with a preface by Sir Auckland Geddes or Lord Reading. She thinks about nothing but her food. ”

“ Brock, hat in hand.
"I trust," he said, "that you will pardon the informality of this visit. Lady Risborough is so sorry not to have been able to call yet, but—but—Yes, I was wondering if you'd be so very kind as to do me a little favour? The fact is, our telephone is out of order—most annoying—and I wondered if you would let me use yours. I hear that you have one."
"I will take you to it," said Mrs. Brock.
"Most kind, most kind!" his lordship was muttering.
There was no difficulty in making my escape now.
E. V. L.
"I do hope you'll be able to come to the Mothers' Welfare meeting on Wednesday. ”

“ On my corridor there is a post of no fewer than three sentries, and it is extremely difficult to evade them. The only thing to do is to get to know three nice ladies on the same floor and arrange for them to have a dressing crisis simultaneously and go on having it for about a quarter-of-an-hour.
This needs a good deal of organisation. However smoothly the operation begins, one of the dressing crises nearly always collapses too soon, and the sentry catches you on your return journey.
For the lady visitor the problem is comparatively simple. ”

“ If they can prevail on the masses to do nothing, at the right moment, and to go on doing nothing till there is nothing left, then, say they, they will have civilisation under; and if our heads don't fall off of their own accord then a thousand willing hands will be stretched forward to pull them off. ”

“ There must be infinite change, and it must be infinitely thorough and infinitely systematic, so that, side by side with the continuous grievances of all dissatisfied parties, will be the certain assurance that those grievances will in strict rotation be remedied. ”

“ He could affect boredom and his exhibition of the glad eye was considered by John's eldest sister to be positively deadly. It is, in fact, true to say that his keen desire to adopt as many human habits as possible often led us to mistake him for one of ourselves.
John, however, was not quite satisfied with his pupil until one bright morning last week when Alfred displayed the first signs of having acquired the Directional Wriggle. Strange as it may sound, this very human trout actually wriggled after John for a distance of five yards. ”

“ What might have been a too sugary conclusion is saved by a pleasant touch of corrective irony in the very last line, where his wife expresses a very human satisfaction on finding that her best necklace was not included in the noble sacrifice. ”

“ A perfect liberty to hedge
And swap the wrong man for the right
Is "Every Woman's Privilege."
O. S.
YET ONE MORE PLAN FOR IRELAND.
Feeling rather lonely because almost everybody had entered for the great Irish Problem Competition in the morning and evening press except myself, I sat down and wrote the following solution, which I posted immediately to the Editors of The Times and of The Westminster Gazette:—
"Sir"—I began indignantly, for I noticed all the best competitors begin like that. ”

“ A dainty little invention has just been tried by the Bolshevists, which consists of a method whereby boiling water from the ship's boiler can be pumped on to sailors who do not obey their officers. It is said to be just the thing to keep their minds off the idea of mutiny. ”

“ A woman has told the medical officer of Burnham that rats so like the poison being used that they come out of their holes for it while it is being put down. We always make our rats stand up and beg for it. ”

“ The objection will, of course, be raised that these continual changes of government will involve a certain amount of disorder; that one system will scarcely be working before it is superseded by another ”

“ In all probability they are now agitating for the two shillings' increase to enable them to have a little side bet.
"We cannot choose how we will be born," says a medical writer. No; some are born poor and others are born into a miner's family. ”

“ We fail to understand how such a remark, coming from a witness, could have been allowed to pass without rebuke from the Judge or protest from the counsel, or some attempt at least to maintain order on the part of the usher.
THE CHANTRY.
Grey dust lies on his battered face ”

“ N. Brock.
With reference to your application for disability pension I am to request that you will furnish this Department with a full statement of the circumstances under which you were wounded, giving the following particulars:—Christian and surname (in block letters) ; regiment; whether (a) demobilised; (b) disembodied; or (c) still serving; whether (a) shot ”