PUNCH, OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI.

VOL. 150

JUNE 21, 1916

CHARIVARIA.

An "Iron Scheer" is to be erected at Cuxhaven in honour of the "victor" of the Battle of Horn Reef. It is thought, however, that lead would be more appropriate than iron for the occasion. It runs more easily under fire.

"I want," said Mr. Roosevelt, at Oyster Bay, "to tell you newspaper men that it is useless to come to see me. I have nothing to say." As however some of them had come quite a long way to see him, he might at least have made a noise like a Bull Moose.

Asked as to the nature of his disability, an appellant informed one of the London Tribunals that he was a member of the V.T.C. This studied insult to a fine body of men was, we are happy to say, repudiated by the Tribunal, which advised the applicant to try to join a "crack" regiment.

No civilians being available for the work, fifty men of the Royal Scots regiment laid half-a-mile of water main at Coggeshall Abbey in record time. This incident should finally dispose of a popular superstition that among the Scotch water is only a secondary consideration.

The Water Board has spent £70 in renovating some Chippendale chairs belonging to the New River Company. The poor shareholders are quite helpless in the matter.

On an acre of ground, a man told the Farnham Tribunal, he kept 9 sows, 34 pigs and 1 horse, and grew a quarter-of-an-acre of mangolds and a quarter-of-an-acre of potatoes. Asked where he kept himself the man is understood to have reluctantly named an exclusive hotel in the West End.

"The extra hour of daylight is turning every City man into a gardener," says The Daily Mail. This must be a source of great concern to our contemporary, according to which, if we read aright, the majority of our public men do their work like gardeners.

"A wave of temperance might come by sending drunkards to prison for a second offence," said Mr. Mead at the West London Court. This remark will cause consternation in those select circles in which a second offence is usually an indication of a discriminating dilettantism.

"Mr. Hughes," says The Daily Mail, "goes to the Paris Conference with the British ideals in his pocket." Personally, we have an idea that things of this sort ought to be left in the Cabinet.

"This war," says The Fishing Gazette, "is going to provide protection to fish from the trawlers in all places where ships sink on trawling-grounds." That, however, is not the real issue, and we cannot too strongly deprecate such an unscrupulous attempt on the part of our contemporary to draw a red herring across the trail.

PUNCTUALITY.

Sergeant. "Fall in agin at 'leven o'clock. An' when I say, 'Fall in at 'leven o'clock,' I mean fall in at 'leven. So fall in at 'alf-past ten!"

According to a New York cable, President Wilson last week headed a procession in favour of military preparedness as an ordinary citizen in a straw hat, blue coat, cream pants, and carrying an American flag on his shoulders. The intensely militant note struck by the cream pants is regarded as a body blow to the hope of the pacificists in the party and astonished even the most chauvinistic of President's admirers.

"For anyone to keep a cow for their private supply of milk is a luxury, and there is no necessity for it," said the Chairman of the Chobham Tribunal, and, as a result of this ruling, a maiden lady in the district who has long cherished the ambition of keeping a bee for her private supply of honey has reluctantly decided to abandon the idea.

Berlin's newest attraction is said to be a young woman named Anna von Bergdorff, who has revealed extraordinary powers of memory, and whose chief accomplishment is to "remember and repeat without error from twenty-five to fifty disconnected words after hearing them once." In these circumstances it would seem to be a thousand pities that the lady was not present when the Kaiser received the news of the famous "victory" of his Fleet in the Battle of Jutland.

In St. Louis, U.S.A., the Democratic National Convention is claiming on behalf of President Wilson that he has "successfully steered the ship of State throughout troublous times without involving the United States in war." Or, as the hyphenateds put it more tersely, "Woodrow has delivered the goods."

In a bird's-nest in a water-pipe at Sheffield a workman has discovered a £20 Bank of England note, which, we understand, has since been claimed by various people in the neighbourhood who have lately been troubled by mysterious thefts of £1 and 10s. Treasury notes, as well as by a man who alleges that he was recently robbed of that exact sum in silver and copper coins.

A traveller who has arrived in Amsterdam from Berlin states that in that city placards have been pasted on all the walls explaining that the Kaiser is not responsible for the War. We hope however that now it has been brought to his notice it is not unreasonable on our part to express the hope that he will promptly decide to go a step further and declare his neutrality.

At an Exhibition of Substitutes now being held in Berlin a special department displayed stage decorations, scenery and costumes made mostly out of paper instead of wool. As a counterblast to the alleged German superiority in matters of this sort, it is pleasant to be able to record the fact that in our English theatres it is no uncommon thing to see an audience made mostly out of the same material.

HEART-TO-HEART TALKS.

(Marshal von Hindenberg and Admiral von Scheer.)

The Admiral. The beer, at any rate, is good.

The Marshal. Yes, the beer is good enough, Heaven be thanked! I only wish everything else was as good as the beer.

The Admiral. So then there is grumbling here too. It was in my mind that I should find everything here in first-rate order and everybody delighted with the condition of things.

The Marshal. So? Then all I can say is that you expected too much. You do not seem to realise how things are going with us. I suppose you had thought the Russians were absolutely done for after what happened to them last year. So thought the All-highest, who has a mania for imagining complete victories and talking about them in language that makes one ashamed of being a German. As if——

The Admiral. Yes, that's quite true. I'll tell you a little story about that later on.

The Marshal. Well, he saw complete victory over the Russians, and what does he do? He withdraws some of my best divisions to the Western Front and throws them into that boiling cauldron at Verdun, where they have all perished to the last man, and leaves me with my thinned line to hold out as best I can; and, not content with this, he permits those accursed Austrians to rush their troops, if indeed they are worthy to be called by that name, headlong into Italy on a mad