c2">Berwick Journal.

A Tweed Cap, we presume.

"The list of these Canadian doctors is a long one.... It includes ... Major Meakins and Captain Thomas Cotton, the distinguished cardiologists, who are now attached to the Hampstead Hospital for the study of the Soldier's Heart."—The Times.

This subject must be far and away the most popular at the present time, and we have an idea that the finest experts are not attached to the Medical profession.

Mother (to little girl engaged in grooming with a nail-brush a newly-born kitten). "Oh, Maisie, I don't think that the mummy-cat would like to see you doing it that way."

Maisie. "Well, Mummy, I couldn't lick it."

HIS LADY FRIEND.

When the post came in Private Grimes was sitting alone, hammering a strip of metal with a stone. During the eight months that this solitary and silent man had been in Flanders he had not received so much as a picture-postcard, and he expected nothing now. But to the surprise not only of himself but of all the men who saw it, this post brought him a letter:—

"Deer Henery she is in the best off helth i thort you mite be wunderin' the wether heer is shokin' As it leeves me at presant Bill."

Grimes read it with obvious satisfaction and put it in his pocket; soon he took it out and read it again.

In the group round the fire that night Grimes was again working on his piece of metal.

"'Eard from 'is girl at last," said Private Brant to the others, indicating Grimes by a jerk of the head. "'Dear 'Arold, when are you goin' to send me the bewtiful ring you're makin'?' she says."

"Ring, is it?" said Parker. "Looks as if it would be more like a kid's 'oop, when it's finished. She must 'ave a finger like two thumbs. Grimes, old son, you can take it from me she won't give you a blanky thank-you for it. Lummy, look at the jools!"—and in the firelight they saw the glint of red and blue against the polished strip of metal.

"Is she young and fair, Grimes?" asked a humourist.

"If she was 'ere she'd teach you manners," said Private Grimes.

The jewels were pieces of glass from a shattered church-window. Grimes was pleased with them, and even whistled a note or two as he worked. "Won't give me a thank-you, eh?" he thought, with a bit of a smile.

Three weeks later he went home on leave. She was not at Victoria (whoever she was). His visit would be a surprise for her. He got off the tram at Vauxhall and turned into the narrow side-streets.

From the yard of a brewery in the distance a van was emerging. A big red-faced man was on the dickey, and on a barrel beside him was something white. Grimes whistled; and the white patch leapt into vigorous life, giving out glad barks and little impatient whines. "Wot cher, Grimey!" called the driver, as he pulled up to lower the wriggling patch of white to the road; and Bess, an ecstatic bull-terrier, with the gladdest of pink-rimmed eyes, came bounding towards the soldier.

He caught her up and took a good look at her. She licked his unwashed unshaven face.

"Looks all right, don't she, Grimey?" asked the other a little anxiously. "Never 'ad a thing to eat but wot you said, all the time."

"Looks a treat, Bill," said Bess's master; and Bill knew that this was high-praise.

"'Ere, Bess, 'ere's a sooveneer," said Grimes. He put her down and, taking her paw in his hand, bent and fastened into place that strip of waste war-metal, ornamented with bits of saints from an old church window in Flanders.

The Preparatory Course.

Application just received on behalf of a young lady who is anxious to do War-service as a teacher in an elementary school:—

"She has had some little test of her powers of discipline, as she has started and trained a pack of Wolf Cubs in the parish."

Farmer. "Now let me see if you can milk that cow."

Girl (by vocation barmaid—regarding the horns). "Which handle's for the milk and which for the cream?"

AT THE PLAY.

"The Riddle."

THE WOLF AND THE RIVAL SLEUTH-HOUNDS.

Mrs. Lytton Miss Irene Vanbrugh.

William Rigg Mr. Oswald Marshall.

James Stronach, K.C. Mr. Dion Boucicault.

For a woman who has barely scraped through a charge of poisoning her husband and has had to change her name and dye her hair from yellow to sable (contrary to the customary order of things) and lead "the wolf's life"—preying, that is, on innocent lambs—there might be worse hells on earth than the Sleeve Ard Hotel, Ardcastle, Co. Down, with its pleasant lake and mountain scenery, its golf and its real Irish waiter. And it was a cruel stroke of bad luck that into this quiet fold, teeming with woolly lambs of all ages in their crisp fleeces of fivers and tenners, there should have intruded (1) a vulgar blackmailer who knew all about her lurid past, and (2) a K.C. with a deadly memory for the details of causes célèbres. And (3) it was a heart-breaking coincidence that the youngest lamb of all should have borne such a striking resemblance to the lady-wolf's dead lover that she wanted to embrace him instead of fleecing him; and (4) that his betrothed should have been the god-daughter of the K.C. with the terrible recording tablets.

But what would you? We are not talking of life, but of a stage-play; and from the moment of the curtain's rise, when Miss Elsom sat down at the piano and sang, without any provocation, a little thing by Mr. Landon Ronald, for the sole benefit of the Irish waiter, to the juncture when the K.C. and the blackmailer got through a game of billiards in about four minutes, we were seldom allowed to forget that we were seeing things in a light that never was on any land but stageland.

Like so many theatrical plays it was written up to what the profession calls a "strong scene." Even the weather was pressed into a shameless collusion; for it was a wet afternoon that gave the K.C. his opportunity, as it might have been in the house on the road to Fiesole, of narrating, with lavish detail and the whole hotel for audience, the story of the murder trial in which "Mrs. Lytton" (the wolf) had figured as the prisoner; and frankly indicating that, if he had been the prosecutor, he could have established her guilt. His object, more moral than humane, and more histrionic