five-pound note.

The booking-clerk took her own time to count out the change, and on leaving the window I found four policemen struggling to keep back an infuriated mob of people, all shrieking imprecations and asking for my blood.

There was but one thing for it—to get to a train before this angry horde could secure its tickets; so I made a wild dash for the moving-staircase, shedding Bradburys en route like a paper-chase.

As I rushed past the ticket-puncher she made a vicious lunge at my out-stretched hand with an enormous pair of pincers, missing the ticket and partially amputating my thumb.

As I have always expected to do, but have never yet done, I missed my footing at the top of the escalator, and my desire to outstrip my enemies was realised beyond my wildest hopes as I crashed, by a series of petrifying somersaults, down the entire flight, to be belched forth like a sausage from a machine at the bottom.

Tattered, torn and in unspeakable agony I picked myself up and found my steering-gear so damaged that I could only move sideways, crab-fashion, and in this manner I crawled on to the platform just as a train was beginning its exit.

I make a leap for it. The gates crash to! Am I inside them or out? Neither. I am pinned there with the first half of my body struggling inside the car while the second half protrudes over the fast-receding platform.

I remember how in my agony it flashed across my mind that I would never again slay a wasp with my fork.

I must have been pulled into the car just in time to stop the tunnel (which is a dreadfully close fit) from bisecting me, for the next thing I remember was being dropped into a corner seat and severely admonished by the guard for getting into the train whilst it was in motion.

I was now a quivering and shapeless mass; nobody pitied me, nobody helped me, so loathsome a spectacle did I present.

Of course the train passed my station, and at the next I was thrown out like a mail-bag, to be trodden on by massed formations of travellers fighting to enter and leave the car by the same door at the same time.

When the multitudes had dispersed and I was alone, by superhuman efforts I contrived to wriggle on my stomach to the foot of the ascending stairway, but not having sufficient strength to wriggle off on arrival at the top, my long-dreaded horror of being sucked under the barrier, where moving stairways disappear, was realised.

By now immune to pain, I regarded the next process (akin to being passed through a mangle) as child's play. To my amazement, after a few minutes amongst giant cog-wheels, I again found the light on the down-going staircase, which precipitated me to the spot from which I had started.

Having thrice performed this revolution, by which time I was as flat as a pancake, I was eventually scraped off by a porter and upbraided for joy-riding.

Finding that those rebukes left me unmoved, for I was practically lifeless, certainly boneless, and, to their horror, ticketless, they folded me up and put me in a drawer pending the arrival of the police.

I was still there when the dream mercifully stopped.

Motor Cyclist. "WHY THE DEUCE DON'T YOU DRIVE ON THE PROPER SIDE OF THE ROAD?"

BIRD-LORE.

II.—PEACOCKS.

"Wanted.—Good stage electrician. No good stage electrician."—The Stage.

There ought to be no difficulty in finding the latter.

CROSS COUNTRY.

A Commander in the Senior Service is the man who gets things done; and long experience has formulated for him a golden rule: "If you want to get things done you must see them done." This laudable maxim applies in a lesser degree to all his subordinates, right down to the newly-joined boy, who can't very well help seeing some things done, unless he makes a habit of working with his eyes shut—a practice which does not appeal particularly to P.O.'s.

The Commander of His Majesty's Battleship Ermyntrude is far from being an exception to the rule; he is a martyr to it. So are his officers. In their enthusiasm they have let the rule run riot. You will soon see that for yourself.

The idea germinated in the practical head of the gunner. It pushed its way into the upper air under the plain cap of the A.P. It budded under the (slighted tilted) head-dress of Number One, and blossomed forth into a full-blown project under the gilded oak-leaves that thatch the Bloke.

He said, "The ship's company will run across country."

The ship's company girded up its loins and awaited further orders.

The course was decided upon. It ran from the signalling station on the south of the island straight to the town on the north. There was no possibility of making a mistake, because you could see the semaphore from anywhere, and you would know when you got to the town because the road stopped there. The various divisions of the ship were to compete against each other. If you came in first you were to be given a ticket numbered "one"; if second, a ticket numbered "two," and so on; and the division which had the smallest total of pips at the end would be the winner.

At 8.15 the ship's pinnace landed the gunner on the town jetty at the north end of the island. He had come to deal with the competitors when they arrived at the winning-post. He had brought with him the bo'sun and the carpenter, his own mate, the bo'sun's mate and the carpenter's mate, four P.O.'s, the sergeant of Marines, a few leading stokers and half-a-dozen hands; fifty fathoms of hawser-laid four-inch white rope; six stout stakes (ash); bags, canvas, twelve (one to collect the tickets earned by each division); and one thousand eight hundred tickets, numbered from one to one thousand eight hundred. (There were only six hundred and fifty runners, but it is well to be on the safe side.)

He dug his stakes into the ground in a V-shaped formation just beyond the place where the road ended and almost opposite the first cottage. Further north he posted his canvas bags, which he fixed at a convenient height above the ground by depending them from the necks of his subordinates. He then rigged his rope around the stakes in such a way that the runners, entering the wide end of the V, would be shepherded one by one through a narrow aperture at the bottom, thus avoiding all suspicion of overcrowding in giving out the tickets. He explained his plan of campaign to his party and took up his post at the foot of the V.

Scarcely had he done so when the A.P. appeared upon the scene. He had brought with him a few friends—a couple of subs, two or three senior snotties and the Captain's secretary, a brace of stewards with the luncheon baskets, and the cutter's crew, who carried between them two large trellis-work screens which the carpenter had knocked up for him.

He passed the time of day with the gunner, marched fifty yards further down towards the starting-point and had his screens deposited in the middle of the road, in such a way that several could enter one end of the enclosure they formed, but only one at a time could go