BY A SMALL WESTERN.—Orientals take off their shoes on entering a Mosque. We remove our hats on entering a Church. Both symbolical; one leaves his understanding outside; the other enters with a clear head.

HORACE IN LONDON.

TO THE COUNTY COUNCIL. (AD REMPUBLICAM.)

MRS. R. AGAIN.—To our excellent old lady, being convalescent, her niece was reading the news. She commenced about the County Council, the first item in the report being headed, "An Articulated Skeleton." "Ah!" interrupted the good lady, "murder will out! And where did they find the skeleton of the Articulated Clerk?"

OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

PROFESSOR HUBERT HERKOMER has "dried his impressions," and given them to the public in a handsome volume brought out by MACMILLAN & CO. It is all interesting even to a non-artistic laic, for there is much "dry point" of general application in the Professor's lectures. Yet, amid all his learning and his light-hearted style, there is occasionally a strain of melancholy, as when he pictures himself to us as "etching and scratching on a bed of burr." Painful, very; likewise Dantesque,—infernally Dantesque. But there is another and a more cheerful view which the Baron prefers to take, and that is, the word-picture which the Professor gives us of his little room in his Bavarian home, where he says, "Under the seat by the table are my bottles"—ah! quite Rabelaisian this!—"with the mordants, and my dishes for the plates." Isn't this rare! "I should add, there is a stove near the door." O Sybarite! Doesn't this suggest the notion of a delightful little dinner à deux! With "the mordants,"—which is, of course, a generic name for sauces of varied piquancy,—and with his "dishes" artistically prepared and set before "the plates," as in due order they should be, he is as correct as he is original. A true bon vivant. The Baron highly commends the book, which only for the rare etchings it contains, is well worth the attention of every amateur of Art, and that he, the Baron, may, one of these days, dine with him, the Professor, is the sincere wish of his truly, and everybody else's truly,

THE BARON DE BOOK-WORMS.

"STUFF AND (NO) NONSENSE!"—"Begorra, 'tis an ill wind that blows nobody any good," said The O'GORMAN DIZER, when he heard that on account of the Influenza there was a Papal dispensation from fasting and abstinence throughout the United kingdom.

IN THE SEAT OF WISDOM.

At a meeting of the Drury Lane Lodge of Freemasons, said the Daily Telegraph, "with all due solemnity was Mr. S.B. BANCROFT installed in the Chair of King SOLOMON." This, whether an easy chair or not, ought to be the seat of wisdom. Poor SOLOMON, the very much married man, was not, however, particularly wise in his latter days, but, of course, this chair was the one used by the Great Grand Master Mason before it was taken from under him, and he fell so heavily, "never to rise again." How fortunate for the Drury Lane Masons to have obtained this chair of SOLOMON's. No doubt it was one of his wise descendants, of whom there are not a few in the neighbourhood of Drury Lane, who consented to part with this treasure to the Masonic Lodgers. So here's King SOLOMON BUSY BANCROFT's good health! "Point, left, right! One, two, three!" (They drink.)

A QUERY BY "PEN."—There was a "Pickwick Exam." invented by CALVERLEY the Inimitable. Why not a "Pendennis" or "Vanity Fair" Exam.? À propos, I would just ask one question of the Thackerayan student, and it is this:—There was one Becky whom everybody knows, but there was another BECKY as good, as kind, as sympathetic, and as simple, as the first Becky was bad, cruel, selfish, and cunning. Where is BECKY the Second to be found in W.M. THACKERAY's Works?

HER NOTE AND QUERY.—Mrs. R. was listening to a ghost-story. "After all," observed her nephew, "the question is, is it true? True, or not true 'there's the rub!'" "Ah! 'there's the rub!'" repeated our old friend, meditatively. "I wonder if that expression is the origin of the proverb, 'Truth is stranger than Friction?'"

LOCAL COLOUR.—"I should like to give all my creditors a dinner," quoth the jovial and hospitable OWEN ORLROUND. "Where shall I have it?" "Well," replied his old friend JOE KOSUS, "have it at Duns Table."

CITY MEN.—"Hope springs eternal," and the motto for a probable Lord Mayor in the not very dim and distant future must be "Knill desperandum."

DOGS AND CATS—(CORRESPONDENCE.)—Sir,—A recent letter to the Spectator mentions the case of a man who "barked like a dog in his sleep." The writer would like to know if anyone has ever had a similar experience. Well, Sir, I knew a whole family of BARKERS, but I never heard them bark. I knew three CATTS, sisters, who kept a shop, and came from Cheshire; yet they were very serious persons, and never grinned. Since this experience I have doubted the simile of the Cheshire specimen of the feline race being founded on fact.—Yours, &c.,

CATO.

WEATHER REFORM.

SIR,—Acquiescence in the state of the weather is no longer comme il faut. Bombarding the Empyrean is as little regarded as throwing stones at monkeys, that they may make reprisals with cocoa-nuts; yet the success of the rain-makers is very doubtful. Their premisses even are disallowed by many considerable authorities. The little experiment which I propose to submit to the meteorological officials is founded on a fact of universal experience, and, if successful, would be of immense utility. Every smoker must be aware that the force of the wind varies inversely as the number of matches. On an absolutely still day, with a heavy pall of fog over the streets, the striking of the last match to light a pipe is invariably accompanied by a breeze, just strong enough to extinguish the nascent flame. Now if two or three thousand men simultaneously struck a last match, the resulting wind would be of very respectable strength—anemometer could tell that.

My proposal then, is this. When anticyclonic conditions next prevail, and the great smoke-cloud incubates its cletch of microbes, let some 5,000 men, provided at the public expense with a pipe of tobacco and one match each, be stationed in the City, at every corner and along the streets, like the police on Lord Mayor's Day. At a given signal, say the firing of the Tower guns, each man strikes his match. Judging from the invariable result in my own case, this would be followed by 5,000 puffs of wind of sufficient strength to extinguish the lights, or, better still, to give the 5,000 men some thirty seconds of intense anxiety, while the wind plays between their fingers and over their hands and round the bowls of their pipes. Multiplying the men by the seconds (5,000 x 30) you get approximately the amount of the wind, in wear and tare and tret. If this experiment were conducted on a duly extensive scale round London; say at Brixton, Kensington, Holloway and Stepney; there can be no doubt that a cyclone would be established, and the fog effectually dissipated. The cost would be slight, and the pipe of tobacco would afford a welcome treat to many a poor fellow out of work in these hard times.

Yours obediently,
PETER PPIPER.

The Cave, Æolian Road, S.W.

ROBERT'S CURE FOR THE HINFLUENZY.

I hopes as I shall not be blamed for my hordacity in writin as I am writin, but it's reelly all the fault of my good-natred Amerrycan frend. He says as it's my bounden dooty to do so, if ony to prove the trooth of the old prowerb that tells us, "that Waiters rushes in where Docters fears to tread!" He's pleased to say as he has never bin in better helth than all larst Jennewerry at the Grand Hotel, and that he owes it all to my sage adwice.

"Allers let Nater be your Dick Tater!" In depressin times like these here, keep the pot a bilin' so to speak; and stand firm to the three hesses, Soup, Shampane, and Sunlight.

The Soup must be Thick Turtel, such as Natur purwides in this here cold seeson, not the Thin Turtel of Summer. The Shampane must be Rich Clicko, or the werry best Pummery, sitch as you can taste the ginerous grapes in, not the pore dry stuff as young Swells drinks, becoz they're told as how it's fashnabel; and the Sunlight can ginerally be got if you knows where to look for it. For instance now, in one of the cold foggy days of last month, my Amerrycan frend said to me, "What on airth, ROBERT, can a gentleman find to do on sitch a orful day as this?" So sez I, "Take a Cab to Wictoria Station, and go to the Cristel Pallis, wark about in the brillient sunshine as you will find there a waiting for you, for about two howers, not a moment longer, then cum strait back, and you shall find a lovly lunch."

And off he went, a larfing to think how he would emuse himself when he came back by pitching into pore me. But it does so happen as Waiters ain't not quite so deaf as sum peeple thinks 'em, and I've offen 'erd peeple say, that amost always, if you sees the Sun a trying for to peep thro the fog, and see how we all gits on without him, a leetle way out of town, on an 'ill, you will see him a shining away like fun!

Well, xacly at 2:30, in cums my frend, a grinnin away like the fablus Chesher Cat, and he says, says he, why Mr. ROBERT, you're a reglar conjurer! It was all xacly as you prosefied! I had two hours' glorious stroll in the Cristel Pallis Gardings in the lovly sunshine!

Hin ten minutes' time he was seated at a purfekly luvly lunch, and a peggin away with sitch a happytight as princes mite enwy!

In times like these, dine out reglar either two or three times a week, and drink generusly, but wisely, not too well, and on receiving the accustomed At, think of the ard times the pore Waiter has had to pass through lately, and dubble, or ewen tribbel the accustumd Fee. You'll never miss it, but, on the contrairy, will sleep all the sounder for it.

Never read no accounts in Noosepapers of hillnesses and sich-like, and keep a few little sixpences in your ticket pocket; then if a pore woman arsks you if you have a penny to spare, say no, but praps this will do as well, and give her a sixpence, and then see her look of estonished rapcher, aye, and ewen share it to some small degree.

Check a frown, and encouridge a smile, and the one will wanish away, and the other dewelope into a larf. Let your principle virtues be ginerosity and ope, and allers look on the brite side of ewerythink, as the Miller said to the Sweep.

ROBERT.

A HUMAN PARADOX.—The man who gives away his friends without losing them.

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