"Weekly Dispatch” Report of Premier’s Speech.

    “Baron Sonnino, by the way, who is of half-Scottish extraction,
    speaks English perfectly.  How many of the master minds at our
    Foreign Office speak Italian perfectly?”

    "Weekly Dispatch” Secret History of the Week.

But in fairness to the “master minds” it should be remembered that few of them have the advantage of a Scotch father and a Welsh mother.

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[Illustration:  Hospital Wardmaid (who has shown the new matron into her room).—­“WELL, I MUST SAY I HOPE YOU’VE COME TO STAY.  YOU’LL BE THE SIXTH MATRON I’VE TRAINED.”]

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AT THE PLAY.

“THE BETTER ’OLE.”

I must congratulate Mr. CHARLES COCHRAN on his courage in transforming the Oxford Music-hall into a home of “the legitimate,” and still more on his good fortune in securing for the initiation of his new venture the play which Captain BRUCE BAIRNSFATHER and Captain ARTHUR ELIOT have written round the adventures of “Old Bill.”  In form it resembles a revue, but I prefer to call it a play, because it possesses a plot, distinct if slight—­an encumbrance banned by most revue producers; and because it contains an abundance of honest spontaneous fun.  The authors start with the advantage, if it be an advantage, that the principal characters are already familiar to the audience through the medium of Captain BAIRNSFATHER’s popular drawings; but they have not been content with reproducing their well-known, now almost hackneyed, adventures, but have added many others which are new and yet “come into the picture.”

Their greatest piece of luck was in finding a comedian exactly fitted to fill the part of the humble hero.  Mr. ARTHUR BOURCHIER as Old Bill is absolutely “it.”  His make-up is perfect; he might have stepped out of the drawing, or sat for it, whichever you please.  But, much more than that, he seems to have exactly realised the sort of man Old Bill probably is in real life—­slow-speaking and stolid in manner, yet with a vein of common-sense underlying his apparent stupidity; much addicted to beer and other liquids, but not brutalized thereby; and, while often grousing and grumbling, nevertheless possessed almost unconsciously of a strong sense of duty and an undaunted determination to see it through.  It is a tribute to the essential truthfulness of Captain BAIRNSFATHER’S conception and Mr. BOURCHIER’S acting that one comes away from The Better ’Ole feeling that there must be thousands of Old Bills at the Front fighting for our freedom.