down and began to undo the sandwiches. "Dear o' Stopes," she said with her mouth full.

We lunched outside Stopes. Surely if Earl Barlow had seen us he would have asked us in. But no doubt his dining-room looked the other way; towards the east and north, as I pointed out to Celia, thus being pleasantly cool at lunch-time.

"Ha, Barlow," I said dramatically, "a time will come when we shall be lunching in there, and you——bah!" And I tossed a potted-grouse sandwich to his dog.

However, that didn't get us any nearer.

"Will you promise," said Celia, "that we shall have lunch in there one day?"

"I promise," I said readily. That gave me about sixty years to do something in.

"I'm like—who was it who saw something of another man's and wouldn't be happy till he got it?"

"The baby in the soap advertisement."

"No, no, some king in history."

"I believe you are thinking of Ahab, but you aren't a bit like him, really. Besides, we're not coveting Stopes. All we want to know is, does Barlow ever let it in the summer?"

"That's it," said Celia eagerly.

"And, if so," I went on, "will he lend us the money to pay the rent with?"

"Er—yes," said Celia. "That's it."

So for a month we have lived in our Castle of Stopes. I see Celia there in her pink sun-bonnet, gathering the flowers lovingly, bringing an armful of them into the hall, disturbing me sometimes in the library with "Aren't they beauties? No, I only just looked in—good luck to you." And she sees me ordering a man about importantly, or waving my hand to her as I ride through the old barn on my road to the golf-course.

But this morning she had an idea.

"Suppose," she said timidly, "you wrote about Stopes, and Mr. Barlow; happened to see it, and knew how much we wanted it, and——"

"Well?"

"Then," said Celia firmly, "if he were a gentleman he would give it to us."

Very well. Now we shall see if Mr. Barlow is a gentleman.

A. A. M.

Correspondence.

"Equal Rights" writes:—

"Dear Sir,—Why are descriptive names confined to boxers, such as Bombardier Wells and Gunboat Smith? Why not Rifleman Redmond, Airman Churchill, Solicitor George, Golfer Asquith, Bushman Wilding, Trundler Hitch, Dude Alexander, Bandsman Beecham, Hunger-Striker Pankhurst? Or, to take Editors——"

[The rest of this communication is omitted owing to considerations of space.—Ed.]

WHEN THE SHIPS COME HOME.

Greece. "ISN'T IT TIME WE STARTED FIGHTING AGAIN?"

Turkey. "YES, I DARESAY. HOW SOON COULD YOU BEGIN?"

Greece. "OH, IN A FEW WEEKS."

Turkey. "NO GOOD FOR ME. SHAN'T BE READY TILL THE AUTUMN".

"We're giving our pastor a new drawing-room carpet on the occasion on his jubilee. Show me something that looks nice but isn't too expensive."

"Here is the very thing, Madame—real Kidderminister."

EGYPT IN VENICE.

"La Légende de Joseph."

Those who know the kind of attractions that the Russian ballet offers in so many of its themes could have easily guessed, without previous enlightenment, what episode in the life of Joseph had been selected for illustration last week at Drury Lane. But they could never have guessed that Herr Tiessen, author of a shilling guide to the intentions of the composer, would attach a transcendental significance to the conduct of Potiphar's Wife. "Through the unknown divine," he informs us, "which is still new and mysterious to her, an imperious desire awakens in her to fathom, to possess this world"—the world, that is to say, which Joseph's imagination creates in the course of an exhibition dance. If this is so, I can only say that her behaviour is strangely misleading.

The scene opens at a party given by Potiphar in Venice. Venice, of course, was not Potiphar's home address; and I marvel a little at the change of venue when I think how much more harmony could have been got out of an Egyptian setting. But then I remind myself that the Russian ballet is nothing if not bizarre. The long banqueting-table recalls the canvases of Veronese, but with discordant notes of the Orient and elsewhere. Potiphar himself, seated on a dais, has the air of an Assyrian bull. By his side Mme. Potiphar wears breeches ending above the knee, with white stockings and high clogs.

For the entertainment of the guests there was a dance of nuptial unveiling and a bout between half-a-dozen Turkish boxers. But it was a decadent and blazé company, and something more piquant was needed for their titillation. This was supplied in the shape of an original dance by the fifteen-year-old Joseph, whom my guide describes as "graceful, wild and pungent." He was introduced in a recumbent posture, and asleep, on a covered stretcher, and at first I had the clever idea that he was the customary corpse that appeared at Egyptian feasts to remind the company of their liability to die. But when he woke up and began to dance I saw at once that I was wrong.

I now know all about the interpretation of Joseph's dance; but I defy anyone to say at sight and without a showman's assistance what precisely he was after. In the Third Figure (according to my guide-book) "there is in his leaps a feeling of heaviness, as if he were bound to earth, and he stumbles once or twice as one who has missed his goal;" but how was I to guess that this signified that his "searching after God" was still ineffectual? or that when in the Fourth Figure he "leaps with light feet" this meant that "Joseph has found God"? I don't blame the boy for not knowing the rule that forbids one art to trespass on the domain of another; but there is no excuse for Herr Strauss, who must have been well aware that, for the conveyance of any but the most obvious emotions, mute dancing can never be a satisfactory substitute for articulate poetry.

However, Potiphar's guests seemed better instructed than I was, for they threw off their apathy and took quite an intelligent interest in Joseph's pas seul. Indeed, one young man (the episode escaped me at the dress rehearsal, but I have it in the guide-book)—one young man, "sobbing, buries his head in his hands, upsetting thereby a dish of fruit." As for Potiphar, it failed to stir the sombre depths of his abysmal boredom, but his wife, whose ennui had hitherto been of the most profound, began to sit up and take notice, and at the end of the dance she sent for Joseph and supplemented his rather exiguous costume with a gross necklace of jewels, letting her hand linger awhile on his bare neck. Already, it will be seen, she was intrigued with the "unknown divine." Joseph, on the contrary, received her attentions without empressement.

In the next scene—after a rather woolly and unintelligible interlude—we see Joseph retiring to his couch in an alcove behind the