It is a charm that never fails
    When friends accost me in the street
  And utter agonizing wails
    About the price of butcher’s meat. 
  “Cheer up,” I tell them, “creels on creels
    Are hastening to your relief;
  Cheer up, my friends, one pound of eels
    Is better than a loin of beef.”

  Then all ye fearful folk, dismayed
    By threatened shortage of supplies,
  Let not your anxious hearts be swayed
    By croakers or their dismal cries;
  But, from Penzance to Galashiels,
    From Abertillery to Crieff,
  Remember that “one pound of eels
    Is better than a loin of beef.”

  But these are only pleasant dreams
    Unless, to realise our hopes,
  Proprietors of ponds and streams
    Re-stock them, like the early Popes. 
  Then, though we still run short of keels
    And corn be leaner in the sheaf,
  We shall at least have endless eels,
    Unnumbered super-loins of beef.

* * * * *

AT THE PLAY.

“BILLETED.”

No wonder the Royalty Management, realising how resolutely determined the public was to have nothing to do with anything so witty and workmanlike as The Foundations of Mr. GALSWORTHY, have for their new bill declined upon the pleasantly trivial comedy of errors and tarradiddles, Billeted.

[Illustration:  BILLETING AND COOING.
    (The happy ending.)
  Captain Rymill ...  MR. DENNIS EADIE.
  Betty Taradine ...  MISS IRIS HOEY.]

Betty Taradine is billeting at her pretty manor-house a nice vague Colonel.  The Vicar’s sister disapproves, because Betty is a grass-widow, and Penelope, the all-but-flapper, an insufficient chaperone.  She expresses her disapproval with a hardy insolence which must be rare with vicars’ sisters in these emancipated times.  Naturally when you have a great deal of palaver about Betty’s husband having deserted her two years ago after a serious tiff, and no word spoken or written since, you rightly guess that the expected new Adjutant, Captain Rymill, will be none other than the missing man.  But you probably don’t guess that Betty, to spoof the Church and keep the Colonel, has decided to kill her husband by faked telegram.  So you have a distinctly intriguing theme, which Miss TENNYSON JESSE and Captain HARWOOD handle with very considerable adroitness and embroider with many really sparkling and laughter-compelling lines.

I should like to ask the pleasant authors some questions.  How is it that the infinitely susceptible Colonel who loves Penelope, but is so overcome by the pseudo-sorrowing Betty that he is afraid of “saying so much more than he means,” and appeals to his invaluable Adjutant for help—­how is it he survived a bachelor till fifty?  And how did Betty, with her abysmal ignorance of