***

From China it is reported that an aboriginal priest now claiming the Throne has been accustomed to eat the flesh of tigers, wolves, leopards, &c., also the human heart.  It is, however, only fair to our own restaurateurs to state that, though China is alleged to be on the eve of war, there is as yet no food-control in that country.

***

An unusual scarcity of wasps is reported from various parts of the country.  Nothing is being done about it.

***

A calf has been sold for two thousand seven hundred guineas in Aberdeenshire.  The plucky purchaser is understood to have had for some time past a craving for a veal cutlet.

***

A new form of frightfulness is evidently being practised upon their guards by our interned Huns.  “Some of them,” says a contemporary, “purchase a hundred cigars with a portion of the one pound a day which is the miserable maximum they may spend on luxuries.”

***

“People who speak of suicide seldom do anything desperate,” says a well-known mental expert.  So that the KAISER’S threat to fight England to the death may be taken for what it is worth.

***

An extraordinary meeting of German Reichstag Members has arrived at the decision that the Germans cannot hope for victory in the field.  We see nothing extraordinary in this.

***

Professor Bergen was once described as “the well-known inventor and philanthropist.”  He still invents (his latest is a gas-thrower, reported by the Berliner Tageblatt to be “a veritable monster of destruction"), but has dropped the other job.

***

A swallow-tail butterfly which escaped from the Zoo has been re-captured at Eastbourne.  When caught it gave the policeman to understand that it would go quietly.

***

Two men, we read, took twenty-two hours to chisel a hole through the three-foot flint concrete roof of the London Opera House.  The report that they did this to avoid the Entertainment Tax has now been contradicted.

***

“The American Winston Churchill,” says The Daily Express, “has to plod through life without a middle name.”  We all have our little cross to bear.  Even the Minister of munitions has to plod through life with the knowledge that there is another Winston Churchill loose about the world.

***

It is proposed that Parliament shall sit from 10 A.M. to 5 P.M., instead of from 3 to 11 P.M.  We do not care for this crude attempt to mix business with politics.

***

The Boundary Commission Report advocates the creation of thirty-one new M.P.’s.  It will be a bitter disappointment for those who were sanguine enough to hope that Redistribution would spell Reform.

***

The Government has commandeered all stocks of rum.  The rigours of war, it seems, must be suffered even by our little tots.