You will draw, I trust, a solace for the strange and alien scene

Where you undergo purgation in a stuffy quarantine.

THE PRODIGIES.

We—Great-aunts Emily and Louisa—had in our innocence been telling a few old fairy stories at bedtime to those three precocities whom our hosts call their children.

We knew that they talked Latin and Greek in their sleep and were too much for their parents in argument, but we thought that at least, at the story hour——

We were stopped by Drusilla. "I don't think much of the moral of that one," she remarked. "It would seem to illustrate the Evil Consequences of Benevolence!"

"But she came alive again," said Evadne, the youngest, in extenuation.

"And the wolf was killed," we ventured in defence of our old story.

"Still," persisted Drusilla, "you couldn't call it encouraging."

"Then in the other case," went on Claude thoughtfully, "considering that she had been left in sole charge of the house and had no business to go out and leave it to the mercy of burglars, what moral are we to draw from the fact that she married a Prince and lived happily ever afterwards?"

"Most of them have that sort of moral," said Drusilla. "And they are every one of them devoid of humour, except of the most obvious kind—no subtlety."

"When I was your age," said poor Louisa gently, "I used to laugh very heartily over the adventures of Tom Thumb."

Claude seemed touched. "There are some capital situations in certain of them," he conceded, "which might be quite effectively treated."

"How?" we asked weakly.

It was Drusilla, the most alarming of the children, who finally undertook to sketch us out an example.

After a short meditation, "Something like this," she said. "The situation, of course, you have met with before, but as remodelled you might call it—

THE TRIUMPH OF VIRTUE;

or,

The Bad Fairy Foiled.

A certain King and Queen had one daughter, to whose christening they invited a large company, forgetting as usual a particularly important and bad-tempered Fairy, who signified her annoyance in the usual manner.

The attendants of the little Princess (having read their story-books) were preparing dolefully enough to fall asleep for a hundred years, when the Fairy, with a contemptuous sniff, remarked that the spell would not take effect for some time yet.

They breathed again and had almost forgotten the affair by the time the Princess had grown up. But the Fairy had so arranged it that the spell fell upon the Princess at the time when she was engaged in making her choice of a husband from among the suitors who had arrived at her father's Court.

The Princess was now bewitched in this way—that good men appeared bad, ugly men handsome, and vice versâ. The Fairy had hoped that she would thus make a mess of her matrimonial affairs and live unhappily ever after.

But she had reckoned without the disposition of the Princess, a kind good girl with an overpowering sense of duty. When pressed to choose, she replied firmly, "I will have no other than Prince Felix."

To her his ugliness seemed pathetic and his character evidently needed reformation so urgently that she longed to be at the job. No one wondered at her choice, for he was, of course, the most handsome and excellent of men.

Ultimately the Fairy broke her spell in a fit of exasperation, but without any gratifying result. The Princess seemed happier than ever and would sometimes say to a slightly puzzled friend:—

"Hasn't Felix improved wonderfully since I married him?"

"From 1910 to 1916 he was Viceroy in India, governing the Dependency through very critical years and enjoying general esteem, as was made clear in 1912, when an attempt was made to assassinate him at Delhi."—"Daily Mail" on Lord Hardinge.

It sounds like a succès d'estime.

THE PUBLIC BENEFACTOR.

Mr. Smillie. "I CAN'T BEAR TO THINK OF YOUR PAYING SO MUCH FOR YOUR COAL. I MUST PUT THAT RIGHT; I MUST SEE THAT YOU DON'T GET ANY."

First Tramp. "In this bit o' noospaper it says: 'The 'ole cause of the world's present disorder is the universal spirit of unrest. I wonder if that's true?"

Second Tramp. "I ain't noticed it."

THE COAL CUP.

It seems to me that we all take a great deal of interest in the miners when they strike, but not nearly enough when they hew. And yet this business of hacking large lumps of fuel out of a hole, since civilisation really depends on it, ought to be represented to us from day to day as the beautiful and thrilling thing that it really is. Yet if we put aside for a moment Mr. Smillie's present demands, we find the main topics of discussion in the daily Press as I write are roughly these:—

• (1) The prospects of League Football and the Cup Ties.
• (2) Ireland.
• (3) The prevalence of deafness amongst blue-eyed cats.
• (4) Mesopotamia.
• (5) The Fall of Man.
• (6) The sale of The Daily Mail, whose circulation during the coming winter is for some reason or other supposed to be almost as important to the children of England as their own.

Of all these topics the first is, of course, by far the most absorbing, and almost everyone has remarked how the love of sport, for which Britons are famous, is growing more passionate than ever. It is not only cricket and football, of course; only the other day there was a shilling sweepstake on the St. Leger in our office and, from what I hear of the form of Westmorland in the County Croquet Championship during the past season—but I have no time to discuss these things now.

The point is that, whilst this excitement over games grows greater and greater, the country is suffering, say the economists, from under-production and the inflation of the wage-bill. This means that everyone is trying to do less work and get more money for it, a very natural ambition which nobody can blame the miners from sharing. I suppose that if they all stopped mining and we had to depend for