astonishment and report the circumstance to section-commanders as if they had lost one round of small arms ammunition or the last cube from an iron ration.

The hobby of the civilian labourer is obstacle-racing. To do this you require a dark night, the assistance of some Royal Engineers, an appointment just behind the front line with some supervisor of labour whom you don't know and don't specially want to, and a four-mile stretch across country to the rendezvous.

You start out at nightfall and do good time over the first hundred yards. The field consists of forty to eighty labourers, and one of the idle rich (formerly styled officers). At the hundred yards' mark the Royal Engineers begin to come in. Obstacle 1 is a model trench, built for instructional purposes and now being turned to obstructional account. There's one place where you can get on to the parades without swimming, and if we started by daylight we might strike it. We do not start by daylight.

Beyond the trench is a wire entanglement, also a fine specimen of early 1915 R.E. work. We may note in passing the trip wire eight yards beyond. We're getting pretty good with it now, but in our early days the R.E. used to get a lot of marks for it.

You go on towards a couple of moated hedges, whimsically barbed in odd spots, and emerge into a park or open space leading into an unhealthy-looking road. It seems all plain sailing to the road—unless you know the R.E., in which case you will not be surprised to find your neck nearly bisected by a horizontal wire designed to encourage telephonic communication.

Eventually you all reach an area known for some obscure reason—if for any at all—as "The Brigade." Here the R.E. have a new game waiting for you. We call it "Hunt the Shovels." You have been instructed to draw shovels from the Brigade. The term covers a space of some thousand square metres intersected with hedges, bridges, rivers, dugouts, horseponds (natural and adventitious), any square metre of which may contain your shovels.

If you are not behind time so far this is where you drop a quarter of an hour. Of course you may just get fed up and go home. But in that case you aren't allowed to play again, and as a matter of fact the game is rather de rigueur out here. So you hide your party behind a sign-post, which tells you—if it were not too dark to read—Infantry Must Not Halt Here, and then a lance-corporal with a good nose for shovels looks through the more likely hiding-places. The search is rendered pleasant as well as interesting by the fact that all the Brigade has been trodden into a morass by months of shovel-hunting.

Beyond the Brigade the obstacles really begin. But if you use a revolver freely for wire-cutting and rope your party together—this prevents anyone sitting down by the wayside to take his boots off "because they draws that bad"—you will reach the rendezvous assigned to you within an hour of the time assigned to you. At this point you will learn that no guide has been seen or heard of there, and, subsequently, that the guide was warned for another square that certainly looks very similar on the map. But again, if you know guides, you will guess that he went straight to the spot where the job was to be done without bothering about anything so intricate or superfluous as a rendezvous. Anyhow you will probably end by getting some sort of casual labour somewhere, some time or other, and no questions asked so long as you don't inadvertently dig through from a main drain into a C.O.'s dugout.

There is a new joke too, a Red Book, out of which we are gradually becoming millionaires. It is full of comfortable claims and allowances for gentlemen serving the King overseas. The only thing is it takes a bit of working out. There are so many channels of enrichment. Thus in June—I forget the exact date—I spent a night in the train. Although I had a bed and beer in bottles all the way from England, not to mention usual meals and part use of doctor, I became entitled to one franc ten centimes in lieu of something which I have now forgotten. (Authority, W.O. Letter 2719.) Then a broken revolver is worth no less than seventy-two shillings, but I have to collect autographs to get that Unclaimed groom's allowance—I don't think my groom has claimed it—comes to nearly four-and-sixpence; and I find I have been quite needlessly getting my hair cut at my own expense these many months.

And yet I am afraid that when have made it all out and got a chartered accountant to account for it—that ought to mean a few pounds Chartered Accountant allowance—my application will be returned to me because the envelope is not that shade of mauve officially ordained for the enclosure of Overseas Officers' Claims.

TO "LIFE" OF NEW YORK.

(In acknowledgment of its "John Bull Number.")

(The War Week by Week, as seen from New York. Being Observations from "Life." By E.S. Martin.)

"The Chairman said he should like to appeal to the good sense of the inhabitants of Duffield, through the Press, to do all they could to darken their windows not only at the front of the houses, but also at the back.

The Clerk said the Council had no power to take action in this matter only by persuasion, and it was decided that 500 leaflets should be distributed by the lamplighters to each house."—Derbyshire Advertiser.

And with pulp so expensive, too!

MR. PUNCH'S POTTED FILMS. THE PLAY WITH A MORAL.

Characters in the Play.

Nancy Primrose. Richard Grenfield. Vera Vavasour.

Richard Grenfield, leaving his native village to seek his fortune in London, bids adieu to Nancy Primrose, his rustic sweetheart. He swears to be true to her.