Chapter 2

"Come now," says I to Mikeen, the poor lad, "let you and me bear the cowld corpse of the diseased back to Herself; mebbe she'll have a shillin' handy in her hand, the way she'd reward us for saving the body from the dogs," says I.

But was me bowld mascot dead? He was not. He was alive and well, the thickness of his wool had saved him. For all that he had not a hair of it left to him, and when he stood up before you you wouldn't know him; he was that ordinary without his fleece, he was no more than a common poor man's goat, he was no more to look at than a skinned rabbit, and that's the truth.

He walked home with meself and Mikeen as meek as a young gerrl.

Herself came runnin' out, all fluttery, to look at him.

"Ah, but that's not _my_ mascot," says she.

"It is, Marm," says I; and I swore to it by the whole Calendar--Mikeen too.

"Bah! how disgustin'. Take it to the cow-house," says she, and stepped indoors without another word.

We led the billy away, him hangin' his head for shame at his nakedness.

"Ye'll do no more mascottin' avic," says I to him. "Sorra luck you would bring to a blind beggar-man the way you are now--you'll never step along again with the drums and tambourines."

And that was the true word, for though Herself had Mikeen rubbing him daily with bear's-grease and hair-lotion he never grew the same grand fleece again, and he'd stand about in the back-field, brooding for hours together, the divilment clane gone out of his system; and if, mebbe, you'd draw the stroke of an ash-plant across his ribs to hearten him, he'd only just look at you sad-like and pass no remarks.

* * * * *

TOP-O'-THE-MORNING.

Top-o'-the-Morning's shoes are off; He runs in the orchard, rough, all day; Chasing the hens for a turn at the trough, Fighting the cows for a place at the hay; With a coat where the Wiltshire mud has dried, With brambles caught in his mane and tail-- Top-o'-the-Morning, pearl and pride Of the foremost flight of the White Horse Vale!

The master he carried is Somewhere in France Leading a cavalry troop to-day, Ready, if Fortune but give him the chance, Ready as ever to show them the way, Riding as straight to his new desire As ever he rode to the line of old, Facing his fences of blood and fire With a brow of flint and a heart of gold.

Do the hoofs of his horses wake a dream Of a trampling crowd at the covert-side, Of a lead on the grass and a glinting stream And Top-o'-the-Morning shortening stride? Does the triumph leap to his shining eyes As the wind of the vale on his cheek blows cold, And the buffeting big brown shoulders rise To his light heel's touch and his light hand's hold?

When the swords are sheathed and the strife is done, And the cry of hounds is a call to men; When the straight-necked Wiltshire foxes run And the first flight rides on the grass again; May Top-o'-the-Morning, sleek of hide, Shod, and tidy of mane and tail, Light, and fit for a man to ride, Lead them once more in the White Horse Vale!

W.H.O.

* * * * *

Polygamy in Workington.

"Supper was served by some of the wives of some of the members."--_Workington News_.

* * * * *

TRAGEDY OF A DUTIFUL WIFE.

* * * * *

* * * * *

OVER-WEIGHT.

_Scene: A London Terminus_.

_Porter_ (_with an air of finality_). It weighs 'undred-and-four pounds. You can't take it, mum.

_Lady Traveller_. Oh, I must take it.

[_Porter is obliged by an irritation of the head to remove his cap, but does not speak._

_Lady Traveller_. It's all right. I know the manager of the line, and he would pass it for me.

_Her Friend_. Isn't your friend manager of the Great Southern?

_Lady Traveller_ (_sharply_). He has a great deal to do with all these railways now. (_To Porter, hopefully, but not very confidently_) That will be all right.

_Porter_. Very sorry, mum. It can't be done.

_Lady Traveller_. My friend the manager would be very much annoyed at my being stopped like this. Only four pounds, too. Why, it's nothing.

[_Porter removes his cap again on account of further irritation._

_Lady Traveller_ (_to her Friend_). I don't know what I'm to do. (_To Porter_) What am I to do?

_Porter_ (_deliberately_). You must open it and take somethink out.

_Lady Traveller_. I can't open it here.

_Porter_ (_ignoring this_). Somethink weighing a bit over four pounds.

_Lady Traveller_. But I can't do it here.

_Porter_ (_ignoring this_). Pair o' boots or somethink.

_Lady Traveller_ (_to her Friend_). He seems to think my boots weigh four pounds.

_Her Friend_. Haven't you got two pairs?

_Lady Traveller_ (_sourly_). Yes, but two pairs of my boots wouldn't weigh four pounds.

_Porter_ (who has been quietly undoing the straps_). Is it locked, mum?

_Lady Traveller_ (_producing key and almost in tears_). It's too bad.

[_She dives into box and extracts two pairs of boots wrapped in newspapers._

_Porter_ (_taking them and weighing them judiciously in his hands_). That's all right, mum.

[_He pushes box on to weighing machine which registers under 100 lbs._

_Lady Traveller_. They're very thick boots, of course. Whatever am I to do with them now?

_Her Friend_. We shall have to carry them. [_Takes one parcel._

_Lady Traveller_. Jane shall hear of this. I told her never to use newspaper for packing.

_Her Friend_ (_suddenly_). There's Major Merriman.

_Lady Traveller_. So it is. Don't let him see us with these dreadful parcels. (_Angrily_) Why don't you turn round? He'll see you.

_Major Merriman_. How do you do?

_Lady Traveller_ (_in great surprise_). Oh, how do you do, Major Merriman? We've been having such an amusing experience, etc., etc.

* * * * *

What made Lord Devonport Dizzy.

"The following resolution was unanimously passed, and ordered to be sent to the Prime Minister and the Food Controller (Lord Beaconsfield)."--_The Western Gazette_.

* * * * *

"Lamp-posts and trees and other pedestrians were found with unpleasant and sometimes violent frequency."--_Beckenham Journal_.

That's the worst of a fog; landmarks will keep on walking about.

* * * * *

_À propos_ of the TSAR'S manifesto:--

"The _Retch_, says: 'The order puts the dot on all the "t's."'"--_Provincial Paper_.

It is a far, far better thing to dot your "t's" than cross your "i's."

* * * * *

* * * * *

* * * * *

NURSERY RHYMES OF LONDON TOWN.

(SECOND SERIES.)

XV.--THE TOWER.

They put a Lady in the Tower, Heigh-o, fiddlededee! They put a Lady in the Tower And told her she was in their power And left her there for half-an-hour, Heigh-o, fiddlededee!

They put a Padlock on the Chain, Heigh-o, fiddlededee! They put a Padlock on the Chain, But they left the Key in the South of Spain, So the Lady took it off again, Heigh-o, fiddlededee!

They put a Bulldog at the Door, Heigh-o, fiddlededee! They put a Bulldog at the Door, He was so old he could only snore, And he'd lost his Tooth the day before, Heigh-o, fiddlededee!

They put a Beefeater at the Gate, Heigh-o, fiddlededee! They put a Beefeater at the Gate, But as his age was eighty-eight His Grandmother said he couldn't wait, Heigh-o, fiddlededee!

They put a Prince to watch the Stair, Heigh-o, fiddlededee! They put a Prince to watch the Stair, But he had a Golden Ring to spare, So he married the Lady then and there, Heigh-o, fiddlededee!

And ever since that grievous hour, Heigh-o, fiddlededee! Ever since that grievous hour When the lovely Lady was in their power They've never put nobody in the Tower, Heigh-o, fiddlededee!

* * * * *

Flattery from the Front.

"I got your parcel quite undamaged, and it came at a time when we were short of grub. I could have eaten a dead monkey, so your cake came in very useful."

* * * * *

"Major-General (Temporary General) Sir Hugh de la Poer Bough, K.C.B., whose name appears in the New Year list of honours as being promoted to the rank of lieutenant-general, is a second cousin of Major-General Hugh Sutlej Kough."--_Liverpool Echo_.

It is rumoured that he is also connected with that famous fighting family the GOUGHS.

* * * * *

A POSTSCRIPT.

(_Suggested by a later list of L. & N.W.R. stations which have been closed._)

A further list of closured stations Elicits further protestations. Blank desolation, grim and stark, Broods sadly o'er Carpenders Park, And Friezland, as perhaps is meet, Is suffering badly from cold feet. The population of Rhosneigr Is raging like a wounded tiger; And those who used to book at Llong Are using language, loud and strong, While residents around Chalk Farm Are filled with anguish and alarm.

N.B. In our anterior lay One letter somehow went astray; We therefore now apologise; 'Tis Aspley, and not Apsley, Guise.

* * * * *

From an article on "Greece and Belgium":--

"King Tino has a black record of blood and treachery to answer, and to compare his case with that of King Leopold is the blackest outrage of all."--_Star_.

Personally we think that it were blacker still to compare his case with that of KING ALBERT.

* * * * *

* * * * *

THE LITTLE RIFT.

My wife and I are in perfect agreement about everything. 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. She made a summer hat out of a bit of my old Panama, encased in the remnants of an evening gown. All was well.

I should be giving you a wrong impression altogether if I were to suggest that there was the slightest difference of opinion between us. I most solemnly declare that I am as good a patriot as she is. Still, as time goes on, I do feel a certain uneasiness, a suggestion of a new domestic element that needs watching.

We are both in it, but the initiative rests with her. She asks me to take two Belgian refugees and the housemaid and the dog and the laundry-hamper along with me in the two-seater to the station, to save petrol. Well, I am willing. She fills the herbaceous border with alternating potatoes and carnations. Well, I am more than willing. She bottles peas and beans. And I say to you that I am proud and happy that she should think of these things.

Above all she gets at the very root of the food problem. I should say that here she has advantages over some, as I belong to the class of husband known as Easily Fed. She has got hold of a whole sheaf of leaflets from the War Office or somewhere--"When is a pie not a pie?" "Leave out the egg;" "How to make something out of something else," etc., etc.; and we feed on those chiefly. She knows I don't like rabbits, and yet I am well aware that rabbits are repeatedly insinuated in such forms as not to leave a single clue. I cannot tell you how I admire and approve. Still it makes me thoughtful sometimes.

No doubt you will believe that we are being drawn together by sharing these hardships. Well, yes. In a way. And yet I don't feel easy about it. We are quite in sympathy, but there is a difference in our point of view. Mine, I affirm, is the nobler. I economize, although I loathe it; while she, I am convinced, is beginning to like it. I don't mean to say that she does it on purpose, but that phrase may give you an idea what I mean. I sometimes wonder wistfully if the hand that put that ugly new steel contraption at the back of the fire to save the coal is really the hand that I wooed and won ten years ago. I see in her the steady growth of an implacable conscience. In moments of depression I have a horrid feeling that she always wanted to do this sort of thing and never got a real chance till now.

We were extraordinarily happy before the War. We were not at all hard up and we had no compunctions about spending money. But now--I wonder how long the War will last? What I am afraid of is the formation of habits. I am already guarding against it by talking about all the things that we are going to do after the War. She quite agrees with me about them, but she isn't enthusiastic. I put my claims pretty high. The garden is to be reconstructed, and I am adding a wing to the house. We are going to travel first, and I am not sure that we shan't have a new cook. And we are to have an Airedale and an Axminster, and a Stilton and a new Panama.

As a matter of fact that is all bluff on my part. I only want to have something in hand to bargain with. If I can ever get back to the _status quo ante_ I will not ask for annexations.

Well, that is how it is. Most eagerly do I fall in with her latest suggestion that I should let her clean my flannel suit with benzine (I don't like the smell of it) instead of getting a new one. Only I live in a growing fear that the day when peace is signed in Europe will be the signal for an outbreak of a new form of warfare in our happy home.

* * * * *

* * * * *

WHAT DID MR. ASQUITH DO?

A famous story tells how a heckler once broke up a Liberal meeting by asking with raucous iteration, "What did Mr. GLADSTONE say in 1878?" or whatever year it was. Nobody knew, and neither did the inquirer himself, but uproar followed and his end was achieved. Now had the question run, "What did Mr. GLADSTONE do?" how different a result! For Mr. GLADSTONE, apart from any trifles of statesmanship or legislation, did two priceless things, as I will show.

Although, writes the Returned Traveller who in our last number was so unhappy about the deterioration that has come upon taxi-drivers, I left England only in October last, I find it a changed place; but no change, not even the iniquitous prices demanded by London's restaurateurs, or the increased darkness, or the queer division of _hors d'oeuvres_ into half-courses and whole-courses (providing an answer at last to the pathetic query, "What is a sardine?" "A whole course, of course")--no change is so striking as the fact that when a paper now refers to the PRIME MINISTER or the PREMIER, it means no longer HERBERT HENRY but DAVID. In a world of flux and mutability I had come to think of Mr. ASQUITH as a rock, a pyramid, a pole-star. But, alas! even he was subject to alteration.

Thinking earnestly upon his career I have realised bow sad it is that he has bequeathed us no ASQUITH legend. Always reserved and intent, he discouraged Press gossip to such a degree as actually to have turned the key on the Tenth Muse. Everybody else might lunch at the hospitable board in Downing Street, but interviewers had no chance. In vain did the Quexes of this frivolous city hope for even a crumb--there was nothing for them. Mr. ASQUITH came into office, held it, and left it without a single concession to Demos's love of personalia. He did not even wear comic collars or white hats or a single eyeglass or any other grotesquely significant thing; and how much poorer are we in consequence and how much poorer will posterity be!

Contrast the case of Mr. 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. 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. Isn't there?

How so to squeeze the sponge as to drive out the last drop of moisture was the problem before the massive intellect of the Grand Old Man. Need I say that he solved it? His method, as he himself in his unselfish way, told one of the diarists, possibly Sir M.E. GRANT-DUFF, possibly Mr. 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. And equally those of us who put into our hot water bottles at night hot tea instead of hot water (as I never have done and never mean to do), so that, waking in the small hours, we may yet not be without refreshment, owe a meed of praise to the same inspired innovator, for, if the chroniclers are correct, it was Mrs. GLADSTONE'S habit to retire to rest with a bottle thus nutritiously filled, which would be ready for her great man on his return from the House weary and athirst.

Here we see the difference between Liberal Premiers. For what has Mr. ASQUITH done towards the solution of domestic problems? 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_.

* * * * *

"Beautiful set of civic cat; very large stole and muff; accept £12."--_The Lady_.

As DICK WHITTINGTON'S mascot is the only civic cat known to history we think the relic should be secured for the Guildhall Museum.

* * * * *

"Simply as a citizen and as a non-party man, I want to say that Mr. Asquith has my affection and respect--and that is the highest guerdon that any statesman can have."--_Extract from Letter in Yorkshire Paper_.

We know now why Mr. ASQUITH refused a peerage. He did not want to vex his modest admirer.

* * * * *

"At Caxton Hall the conference was resumed of municipal authorities interested in the conversation of old fruit, sardine and salmon tins."--_Birmingham Daily Mail_.

We ourselves always listen with pleasure to their talk. It has at once a fruity and a fishy flavour.

* * * * *

WARS OF THE PAST.

(_As recorded in the Press of the period._)

VI.

_From "The Athens Advertiser and Piræus Post_."

MACEDONIA'S ARMY.

THE FAMOUS PHALANX.

(_By our Military Expert_.)

The Macedonian Army has recently undergone an entire reconstruction at the hands of KING PHILIP. It is now organised on a national and territorial basis and is divided into infantry and cavalry. The cavalry predominates and is therefore the stronger arm. The unit of cavalry is the squadron, of infantry the battalion. (It is of the utmost interest to note that there are two battalions in a regiment, each about fifteen hundred strong).

KING PHILIP, it will be remembered, received his military education in the school of EPAMINONDAS, who, as is well known, revolutionised the Higher Thought of every Higher Command by the discovery and application of a single tactical fact--namely, that the chances of A being able to give B a stronger push than B can give him are _in direct ratio to the numerical superiority of A over B_. It follows, then, that, faced with a sufficient superiority, B _must_ retire, and _the initiative then rests with the side that possesses it_.

In pursuance of this tactical ideal EPAMINONDAS argued that the old method of winning battles, which was that A should exercise superior force against every point of B's line (or body), required that A should be bigger than B, buskin for buskin and brisket for brisket. But since it is sufficient, while "refusing" the rest of one's own body (or line), to bring an overwhelming force to bear on the point of a person's jaw, in order to discomfit him, so in a battle a numerically inferior A, by concentrating on a vital point of numerically superior B, can gain a local numerical superiority which will enable him to rout B utterly. (This is always supposing that B is not doing the same thing himself on the other wing, in which case each army would miss the other altogether--a condition of things into which the military art does not care to follow them).