Yesterday I and other passengers boarded a ramshackle aero-a-banc (the floor of which was covered with musty straw) with the intention of having a “joy-trip” to Rottingdean.  The fare was two shillings and sixpence.  We had not mounted five hundred feet into the air before the driver yelled to us, “Nah then, another ’arf-a-chrahn all rahnd or I’ll loop the loop.”  We were forced to comply with the demand of this highwayman of the atmospheric thoroughfares; but on alighting I took the first opportunity of giving his number to a policeman.

One sighs for the old-fashioned courtesy of the taxi-cab driver of another decade.

Yours, etc., CONSTANT READER.

* * * * *

COMMERCIAL ALTRUISM.

    “Why not give your jaded palate a new pleasure?  ‘Impossible!’ you
    say.  This is so, if you smoke Our Tobacco, otherwise not nearly
    so impossible as you think.”—­Port Elizabeth Paper.

* * * * *

[Illustration:  Farmer (contemplating new hand).  “WELL, AT ALL EVENTS HE DON’T SEEM TO BE INFECTED WITH THIS HERE LABOUR UNREST.”]

* * * * *

THE ARK.

    [The Dean of LINCOLN is reported to have informed the Lower House
    of Convocation that he “simply did not believe” in the Biblical
    episode of the Ark.]

  The dangerous voyage at length is o’er
  And she has crossed the oilcloth floor
  And grounded on the woolly mat,
  The wooded slopes of Ararat. 
  Upon this lately flooded land
  It’s very difficult to stand
  The animals in double row,
  When some have lost a leg or so;
  A book is best to carry those
  Who still feel sea-sick in their toes. 
  For NOAH and his sons and wives
  This is the moment of their lives;
  They walk together up and down
  In stiff wide hat and dressing-gown,
  Well pleased to greet the dove once more,
  Who landed safe the day before.

  You recollect that day of rain,
  Of drumming roof, of streaming pane,
  How, just before the hour of tea,
  A great light bathed the nursery;
  And you those tiresome tresses shook
  Back from your eyes and whispered, “Look!”
  The day-lost sun was sinking low,
  Filling the world with after-glow;
  We saw together, you and I,
  A rainbow right across the sky.

* * * * *

Though years divide us, old and grey,
From childhood’s distant yesterday;
In spite of unbelieving Deans
We still know what a rainbow means.

* * * * *

MUSICAL GOSSIP FROM THE GERMAN FRONT.

“For the last twenty years,” writes M. JEAN-AUBRY, a distinguished French musical critic, “the temple of German music has been no longer at Bonn, or Weimar, or Munich, or Bayreuth, but at Essen.  The modern German orchestra, with Strauss and Mahler, was concerned more with the preoccupations of artillery and the siege-train than with those of real music.  It desired to become a rival of Krupp.”