THE BALLAD OF JONES'S BLIGHTY.

Another Impending Apology.

"Many coolies of the savage tribes from the hilly places, who have been enlisted for the labour corps, were seen passing this town by train lately. Some had too few clothes. Our late Chief Secretary, the Hon'ble Mr. ——, was seen among them."—Times of Assam.

"All can sympathise with Mr. —— and his teetotal party in deploring the excesses of 'liquor' of any description, and the vice, want and misery it brings in its course. But we cannot for a single moment listen to their selfish and pitiful beatings, when we know that if their methods were carried out through the land it would people our beloved country with a virile race of effete degenerates."—Provincial Paper.

"Virile" is good, and should encourage the teetotalers to proceed with their "beatings."

German Cavalry in (and out of) Action.

"'Polybe,' writing in the Figaro, estimates the German losses at 20,000 horse de combat on the first day of the battle."—Local Paper.

"Following the Franco-German war an epidemic of smallpox raged throughout Europe, which was not checked until Jenner's famous vaccination discovery."—Liverpool Echo.

It is sad to think that JENNER's discovery, made in 1796, should have remained dormant till after 1870.

"Mr. Gerard's reminiscences have caused much perturbation in German Court circles."—Daily Paper.

"A money prize offered to boys at Barcombe, Suxxes, for killing cabbage butterflies resulted in over 4,000 insects being destroyed. The winner, Victor King, accounted for 1,395."—Liverpool Echo.

We congratulate him on his Suxxes.

"One new thing he [Mr. HENDERSON] disclosed was that in his pervious statement that carried the Conference to the Stockholm vote, &c."—Daily Mail.

As "pervious," according to WEBSTER, means "capable of being seen through," we think the printer is to be congratulated.

AN IDEAL MEDICAL BOARD.

(A Dream of the Future.)

I was due to go in front of the local Medical Board next morning, and I was seeking distraction in the evening paper. Suddenly my eye was caught by the headlines announcing the transfer of recruiting arrangements from the Military to the Civil authorities. This promised to be interesting.

All at once the room grew misty, and when the atmosphere cleared again I found myself in the open street. Before me was a palatial building with the words "Medical Board" carved on a marble slab over the main entrance.

I entered, and was immediately confronted by a liveried janitor who bowed obsequiously.

"I have come to be medically examined," I explained.

"Yes, Sir," he replied. "Will you be good enough to wait one moment, Sir, while I settle with your taxi-driver, and then I will take you to the waiting-room, Sir."

"I have no taxi," I said. "I just walked."

An expression of concern passed across his face.

"Oh, you shouldn't have done that, Sir. The Authorities don't like it. There is a special fund for such expenses, you know, Sir. Will you please come this way, Sir?"

I followed him along the corridor, and was shown into a luxurious apartment overlooking a pleasant garden. The janitor placed an easy chair in position for me, handed me a copy of Punch, and brought me a glass of wine and some biscuits.

"Now, Sir, if you will give me your papers I will send them up to the Board."

I handed the packet to him, and he left the room.

A few minutes later a message-girl entered.

"Are you Mr. Smith?" she inquired.

I confessed that I was, upon which she handed me a sealed envelope. I opened it, and found a letter and a cheque for five pounds. The letter ran as follows:—

"SIR,—The above-named Medical Board regrets its inability to examine you to-day. As you are no doubt aware, it is contrary to its rule to examine more than three persons in one day, and an unusually difficult case, held over from yesterday, has upset all its arrangements.

"The Board would consider it a favour if you could make it convenient to call again to-morrow morning at the same time.

"The enclosed cheque is intended to compensate you for the unnecessary trouble to which you have been put.

"Your obedient Servants ——"

Punctually at the time appointed I again entered the building, and was met by the same janitor.

"The Board is quite ready for you, Sir," he said. "Will you please ascend to the dressing-room, Sir?"

He committed me to the care of a lift-girl, who conveyed me to the second storey. Here I was handed over to a smart valet, who assisted me to undress in a comfortable little apartment replete with every convenience.

Having donned a warm dressing-gown, I was conducted to the Board Room, where I found a dozen of our greatest Specialists assembled. The President shook hands and greeted me effusively. Then I passed in turn from one Doctor to another, each making, with the utmost delicacy and consideration, a thorough examination of that part of my anatomy on which he was an acknowledged expert.

When this was over I was invited to retire to the dressing-room and resume my garments while the Board held a protracted consultation on my case. On returning to the Board Room I was provided with a seat, and the President addressed me.

"Well, Mr. Smith, we can find nothing constitutionally wrong with you. But tell me, have you ever had any serious illness?"

I shook my head. I had always been abnormally healthy.

"Think carefully," he urged. "We don't want to pass you as fit if we can help it."

He seemed so anxious that I felt ashamed to disappoint him.

"Well," I replied, "the only thing I can call to mind is that, according to my mother, I had a severe teething rash when I was ten months old."

As I uttered these words the faces of all became suddenly grave.

"That is quite enough, Mr. Smith," said the President. "You are given total exemption. You should never have been brought here at all, but I am sure you will realise that in times of national emergency mistakes of this nature are bound to occur. If you will apply to the Cashier on your way out he will give you a draft for twenty pounds, to reimburse you in some small way for the loss of your valuable time. Good-bye!"

He held out his hand, but before I could grasp it a mist again enveloped me, from which I emerged upon the dreadful facts of life.

SONGS OF FOOD PRODUCTION

VI.

BALLAD OF THE POTATO.

The Revenant.

"CAPTAIN STANLEY WILSON'S RETURN HOME.

"CHEERFUL AND WELL AFTER LONG INTERMENT."—Yorkshire Post.

"Gentleman, 30, offers 10/- weekly, own laundry, and help with children, refined country home. No needlework."—The Lady.

Slacker!

Letter sent by a soldier's wife to the Army Pay Department:—

"I am sending you my marage sertificate and six children there were seven but won died. You only sent six back her name was fanny and was baptised on a half sheet of paper by the reverend Thomas."

A Centenary.

JOHN LEECH.

Born August 29th, 1817.

I.—TO OUR GREATEST CONTRIBUTOR.

II.—HISTORIAN AND PROPHET.

A hundred years ago to the very day was JOHN LEECH born. Mr. Punch came into the world on July 17th, 1841, and was thus twenty-four years younger. But in spite of any disparity in age the two great men were made for each other. JOHN LEECH without Mr. Punch would still have spread delight, for did he not illustrate those Handley Cross novels which his friend THACKERAY said he would rather have written than any of his own books? But to think of Mr. Punch without JOHN LEECH is, as the Irishman said, unthinkable. From the third volume, when LEECH got really into his stride, until his lamented early death in 1864, LEECH'S genius was at the service of his young friend: his quick perceptive kindly eyes ever vigilant for humorous incident, his ears alert for humorous sayings, and his hand translating all into pictorial drama and by a sure and benign instinct seizing always upon the happiest moment.

His three monumental volumes called Pictures of Life and Character constitute a truer history of the English people in the middle of the last century than any author could have composed: history made gay with laughter, but history none the less. And this leaves out of account altogether the artist's work as a cartoonist, where he often exceeded the duty of the historian, and not only recorded the course of events but actually influenced it.

To influence the course of events was however far from being this simple gentleman's ambition. What he chiefly wished was to enable others to share his own enjoyment in the fun and foibles of a world in which it is better to be cheerful than sad, and, in the process of passing on his amusement, to earn a sufficient livelihood to enable him to pay his way and now and then be free to follow the hounds.

All these praises he would probably wish unsaid, so modest and unassuming was he. Let us therefore stop and merely draw attention to the two pages of his drawings which follow, each of which shows JOHN LEECH in the light of a prophet.

ANTICIPATIONS BY JOHN LEECH.

ANTICIPATIONS BY JOHN LEECH.

A BALLAD OF EELS.

["Lord Desborough has just been reminding us of the neglected source of food supply that we have in the eels of our rivers and ponds. He stated, 'The food value of an eel is remarkable. In food value one pound of eels is better than a loin of beef.... The greatest eel-breeding establishment in the world is at Comacchio, on the Adriatic. This eel nursery is a gigantic swamp of 140 miles in circumference. It has been in existence for centuries, and in the sixteenth century it yielded an annual revenue of £1,200 to the Pope.'"—Liverpool Daily Post.]

AT THE PLAY.

"BILLETED."

No wonder the Royalty Management, realising how resolutely determined the public was to have nothing to do with anything so witty and workmanlike as The Foundations of Mr. GALSWORTHY, have for their new bill declined upon the pleasantly trivial comedy of errors and tarradiddles, Billeted.

Betty Taradine is billeting at her pretty manor-house a nice vague Colonel. The Vicar's sister disapproves, because Betty is a grass-widow, and Penelope, the all-but-flapper, an insufficient chaperone. She expresses her disapproval with a hardy insolence which must be rare with vicars' sisters in these emancipated times. Naturally when you have a great deal of palaver about Betty's husband having deserted her two years ago after a serious tiff, and no word spoken or written since, you rightly guess that the expected new Adjutant, Captain Rymill, will be none other than the missing man. But you probably don't guess that Betty, to spoof the Church and keep the Colonel, has decided to kill her husband by faked telegram. So you have a distinctly intriguing theme, which Miss TENNYSON JESSE and Captain HARWOOD handle with very considerable adroitness and embroider with many really sparkling and laughter-compelling lines.

I should like to ask the pleasant authors some questions. How is it that the infinitely susceptible Colonel who loves Penelope, but is so overcome by the pseudo-sorrowing Betty that he is afraid of "saying so much more than he means," and appeals to his invaluable Adjutant for help—how is it he survived a bachelor till fifty? And how did Betty, with her abysmal ignorance of pass-book lore, manage to postpone her financial catastrophe for two whole years? And how do they suppose so popular and personable man as Taradine could come back to England under an assumed name without a number of highly inconvenient questions being asked? More seriously, I would ask if they really expect us to believe in the reconciliation on so deep a note of this nice butterfly and this callous husband, who never intended, but for the War, to come back from his big-game shooting, and who took no pains to arrange suitable guidance (there was a lawyer vaguely mentioned but he seems to have been singularly unobtrusive) for the obviously incompetent spouse whom he professes still to love? I am afraid it will not do. The one real point of weakness in the presentation was that Mr. EADIE could not modulate from the key of agreeable flippancy in which the comedy as a whole was set into that of the solemnly sentimental coda. Thus was the artistic unity of a pleasant trifle destroyed.

Mr. DAWSON MILWARD'S clever careful method made the Colonel a very live and plausible figure. Some of his intimate touches were exceedingly adroit. The authors deserve a fair share of the credit. Indeed there was throughout a suggestion of clever characterisation conspicuously above the average of this genre. Penelope was an excellently developed part, rendered with unexpectedly mature skill by Miss STELLA JESSE. The Vicar promised at first to be a new type, but the authors seemed to have lost interest in him half-way, and not even Mr. LAWRENCE HANRAY'S skill and restraint could quite save him. I rate Mr. EADIE as an actor too high to be much amused by him in obviously EADIE parts. "A man's reach must exceed his grasp." I think it just to Miss HOEY to say that she seemed a little handicapped by efforts of memory, a condition which will duly disappear and leave her charm to assert itself. Mr. GEORGE HOWARD was quite admirable as a Scots bank manager; Miss BLANCHE STANLEY, a really sound combination of essential good-nature and wounded dignity as a cook on the verge of giving notice. Miss GERTRUDE STERROLL tackled a vicaress of the Mid-Victorian era (authors' responsibility this) with a courage which deserves both praise and sympathy.

T.

THE AIRMAN.

"A well-known Liverpool shipowner and philanthropist is giving £70,000—£100 for each year of his life—to various charitable and philanthropic objects."—Scotsman.

He might almost have lived in the time of the Patriarchs, but we gather that he preferred the days of the profits.

"Often it was impossible to detect the existence of underground works until their occupants opened fire. At one such spot a white hag was displayed, and when our men charily approached a burst of fire met them."—East Anglian Daily Times.

The enemy is evidently up to his old trick—taking cover behind women.

OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)

I foresee the appearance, during the next few years, of many regimental handbooks that will record the history at this present visibly and gloriously in the making. One such has already reached me, a second edition of A Brief History of the King's Royal Rifle Corps (WARREN), compiled and edited by Lieut.-General Sir EDWARD HUTTON, K.C.B. It is a book to be bought and treasured by many to whom the record of a fine and famous regiment has become in these last years doubly precious. The moment of its appearance is indeed excellently opportune, from the fact that, in the first place, the K.R.R. was recruited from our brothers across the Atlantic, the 60th Royal Americans (as they were then) having been raised, in 1756, from the colonists in the Eastern States, with a view to retrieving the recent disaster to General BRADDOCK'S troops, and to provide a force that could meet the French and Indians upon equal terms. Thus the Regiment, which its historian modestly calls a typical unit of the British Army, is in its origin another link between the two great English-speaking allies of to-day. It has a record, certainly second to none, from Quebec to Ypres—one that splendidly bears out the words, themselves ringing like steel, of its motto, Celer et Audax. I should add that all profits from the sale of the book will go to "The Ladies' Guild of the King's Royal Rifle Corps." Friends past and present will no doubt see to it that these profits are considerable.

In The Immortal Gamble (A. AND C. BLACK), by A.T. STEWART and C.J. PESHALL, the Acting Commander and Chaplain of H.M.S. Cornwallis describe the part taken by their ship and its gallant complement in the bombardment of Gallipoli and the subsequent landings down to the final evacuation. The account is clear, concise, unemotional, and uncontroversial. As a glimpse rather than a survey of the Dardanelles campaign it strengthens our faith in the spirit of the race without hopelessly undermining our confidence in its intelligence. Beyond the fact that it records deeds of brave men the book has no mission, and its cheerful detachment might not, in the absence of sterner chronicles, be salutary. But as long as there are enough Commissions to publish scathing reports on this or that phase of national ineptitude it is not the publishers' business to provide cathartics for the fatted soul of a self-satisfied people. As the passing of time obliterates the futilities and burnishes the heroisms of the noblest and most forlorn adventure in the history of the race, The Immortal Gamble will find a just place among the simple chronicles of courage which the War is storing up for the inspiration of the generations to come.

I fancy that of late the cinema has somewhat departed from its life-long preoccupation with the cow-boy, otherwise, I should have little hesitation in predicting a great future on the film for Naomi of the Mountains (CASSELL). For this very stirring drama of the wilder West is so packed with what I can't resist calling "reelism" that it is almost impossible to think of it otherwise than in terms of the screen. It is concerned with the wooing, by two contrasted suitors, of Naomi, herself more or less a child of nature, who dwelt in the back-of-beyond with her old, fanatic and extremely unpleasant father. But, though the action is of the breathless type that we have come to expect from such a setting, there is far more character and serious observation than you would be prepared to find. Mr. CHRISTOPHER CULLEY has drawn a real woman, and at least two human and well-observed men. I will not give you in detail the varied course of Naomi's romance, which ends in a perfect orgy of battle, with sheriffs and shooting, redskins and revolvers—in short, all the effects that Mr. HAWTREY not long ago so successfully illustrated on the stage. To sum up, I should describe Naomi of the Mountains as melodrama with a difference—the difference residing in its clever character-drawing and some touches of genuine emotion which lift it above the ordinary. And this from one to whom the Wild West in fiction has long been a weariness is something more than tepid praise.

Sir CHARLES WALDSTEIN, author of the thoughtful Aristodemocracy, is a thinker with an internationalist mind. But pray don't think he's not a whole-hogger about the War. In What Germany is Fighting For (LONGMANS) he analyses the Germans' statement of their war-aims and does good service by presenting an excellent translation, with comment and epilogue, of the famous manifesto of "The Six Associations," and the "Independent Committee for a German Peace." It is an insolent, humourless, immoral document. Anything like it published in England would be laughed out of court by Englishmen. It is difficult to keep one's temper when one reads all this nauseating stuff about the little German lamb being threatened by the wolf, England (or Russia or France, as best suits the current paragraph), and Germany's fine solicitude for the freedom of the seas. It is no disrespect to Sir CHARLES WALDSTEIN that his acute and dispassionate comment is not so forcible an argument to hold us unflinchingly to the essence of our task as any page of the manifesto itself. The German, with all his craft, has an almost unlimited capacity for giving himself away. It would seem that, after all, humour is the best gift of the gods.... Our commentator ends with an epigram to the general effect that "until they adopt, in common with us, the ideal of the Gentleman, in contradistinction to that of the Superman," we must continue to strafe them in war or peace. His book constitutes an important War document.

If I had been compelled to nominate an author to write a book called The Gossip Shop (HODDER AND STOUGHTON) I should have selected Mrs. J.E. BUCKROSE without a moment's hesitation. So I ought to be happy. Anything more soothing to tired nerves than the tittle-tattle of these Wendlebury old ladies it is impossible to imagine. And to add to the lullaby we are given an ancient cab-horse called Griselda, who with a flick of her tail seems to render the atmosphere even more calm and serene. Then there is a love-story which, in spite of misunderstandings, is never really perturbing, and—as a spice—a fortune telling lady who in such respectable society is as near to being naughty as doesn't matter. Small beer? Perhaps. But if you want to get away from the War and rumours of it, I advise you to take a draught of this tranquillizing potion.

From a Booksellers' Catalogue:—

"PLUTARCH: His Life, his Parallel Lives, and his Morals. 3/6."

So spicy a story is surely cheap at the price.

"The cause of the explosion is unknown, but it is assumed that some combustible matter was among the coal."—Daily Dispatch.

It is only fair to some of the coal merchants to say that they take great pains to reduce this danger to a minimum.

The Fishes' Feast.

"Sugar cargoes amounting to over 40,000 tons have been put down by mines and submarines."—Daily Paper.