recording all his virtues, and with a bas-relief of herself (a very inaccurate representation, I am told, as it gave her a Madonna-like appearance to which she can lay no claim in real life) shedding tears upon his sarcophagus."

Madame Marcot paused for breath, and, thinking the story finished, we drifted in with appropriate comments. But we were soon cut short.

"Ten months afterwards," continued the lady dramatically, "as Madame de Blanchet, dressed of course in the deepest mourning, was making strawberry jam in the kitchen and weeping over her sorrows, who should walk in but Monsieur?"

"What—her husband?" cried everybody.

"The same," answered Madame Marcot. "He was a spectacle. He had lost an arm; his clothing was in tatters, and he was as thin as a skeleton. But it was Monsieur de Blanchet all the same."

"What had happened?" we shrieked in chorus.

"What has happened more than once in the course of this War. He had been taken prisoner, had been unable to communicate and at last, after many marvellous adventures, had succeeded in escaping."

"But the other?" we cried.

"Ah, now we come to the really desolating part of the affair," said Madame Marcot. "The corpse in M. de Blanchets clothing, what was he but a villainous Boche—stout, as is the way of these messieurs—who had appropriated the clothes of the unfortunate prisoner, uniform, badges, disc and all, in order, no doubt, to get into our lines and play the spy. Happily a shell put an end to his activities; but by the grossest piece of ill-luck it made him completely unrecognisable, so that Madame de Blanchet, as well as the officers who identified him, were naturally led into the mistake of thinking him a good Frenchman, fallen in the exercise of his duty."

"What happiness to see him back!" I remarked.

"I believe you," said Madame Marcot, "and touching was the joy of M. de Blanchet too, until he observed her mourning. He was then inclined to be slightly hurt at her taking his death so readily for granted. However, she soon explained the case; but, when he heard that a nameless member of the unspeakable race was occupying the place in the family vault that he had been reserving for himself for years past at considerable cost, he became exceedingly annoyed; and when, through the medium of his relations, he learned of the first-class funeral, and of the oak coffin studded with silver, and the expensive full choral mass, and the requiem specially written for the occasion, and the marble monument, his wrath was such that in pre-war days, and before he had undergone the reducing influence of the German hunger-diet, he would certainly have had an apoplectic seizure. To a man of his economical turn of mind it was naturally enraging. But the thing that put the climax on his exasperation was the bas-relief of his wife, 'ridiculously svelte' as he remarked, shedding tears over the ashes of a wretched Boche.

"The situation for him and for the family generally," concluded Madame Marcot, "is, as you will readily conceive, one of extreme unpleasantness and delicacy. The cost of exhuming the Hun, after the really outrageous expense of his interment, is one that a thrifty man like M. de Blanchet must naturally shrink from; indeed he assures me that his pocket simply does not permit of it.

"In the meantime he can never go to lay a wreath upon the tombs of his sainted father and mother, or pass through the cemetery on his way to mass (he is a good Catholic), without being reminded of the miserable interloper and all the circumstances of his magnificent first-class funeral. Hence he is a man with a grievance—an undying grievance, I may say—for he is practically certain to have a ghost hereafter haunting the spot that ought to be its resting-place but isn't. Still, it is chic to have a ghost in the family. The de Blanchets will be more distinguished than ever."

"'OW'S YOUR SON GETTIN' ON IN THE ARMY, MRS. PODDISH?"

"FINE, THANKEE. THEY'VE MADE 'IM A COLONEL."

"OH, COME——"

"CAPTAIN, THEN."

"GO ON. YOU MEAN CORPORAL, P'RAPS."

"WELL, 'AVE IT THAT WAY IF YOU LIKE. I KNOW IT BEGAN WITH A 'K.'"

Lifting and Uplifting.

Our Canadian contemporary, Jack Canuck, publishes a protest against the invasion of Canada by British temperance reformers, whom it describes as "uplifters." Immediately below this protest it produces a picture from Punch, lifted without any acknowledgment of its origin.

"On Sunday one British pilot, flying at 1,000 ft., saw four hostile craft at about 5,000 ft., and dived more than a mile directly at them. As he whirled past the nearest machine he opened fire, and saw the observer crumple up in the fusselage as the pilot put the machine into a steep live."—Dally Sketch.

While confessing ignorance as to the exact nature of a "live," we are sure it is not as steep as the rest of the story.

 

A Muscular Christian.

"Vicar, Compton Dando, Bristol, would Let two Fields, or few Yearlings could run with him."—Bristol Times and Mirror.

THE PERSONAL EQUATION.

Time 1940.

"WHAT DID YOU DO IN THE GREAT WAR, GRANDPA?"     "WHAT DID I DO, MY LAD? I HELPED TO RELIEVE MAFEKING."

THE MUSINGS OF MARCUS MULL.

(In the manner of an illustrious Mentor.)

I.

I noted in last week's issue the persistence of the strange story that Mr. Gladstone, in his wrath at his reduced majority in Midlothian, broke chairs when the news arrived. I was careful to add that, as the result of searching investigation, I was in a position to state that Mr. Gladstone never did any such thing. Still I cannot altogether regret having alluded to the story in view of the interesting letters on the subject which have reached me from a number of esteemed correspondents.

II.

As an eminent Dundonian divine, who wishes to remain anonymous, remarks, it is a melancholy fact that men of genius have often been prone to violent ebullitions of temper. He recalls the sad case of Milton, who, while he was dictating his Areopagitica, threw an ink-horn at his daughter, "to the complete denigration of her habiliments," as he himself described it. Yet Milton was a man of high character and replete with moral uplift. I remember that my old master, Professor Cawker of Aberdeen, once told me that as a child he was liable to fits of freakishness, in one of which he secreted himself under the table during a dinner-party at his father's house and sewed the dresses of the ladies together. The result, when they rose to leave the room, was disastrous in the extreme. But Professor Cawker, as I need hardly remind my readers, was a genial and noble-hearted man. I presented him on his marriage with a set of garnet studs. Ever after when I dined at his house he wore them. Nothing was ever said between us, but we both knew, and I shall never forget.

III.

My old friend, Lemmens Porter, whose name I deeply regret not to have read in the Honours List, reminds me of the painful story of