“Yonder there hangs the helmet of a Hun,
    And I will hang this horror at its side;
  Twin symbols of an epoch which is done,
    These shall remind our children——­” My wife sighed,
  “You’ll have to get another one, I fear;”
  And all I said was, “Very well, my dear.”

A.P.H.

* * * * *

COMMERCIAL CANDOUR.

Notice in a cobbler’s window:—­

    “Will customers please bring their own paper for repairs?”

* * * * *

    “Miss Carnegie wore a gown of white satin and point applique lace,
    with a lace veil falling from a light brown coiffeur almost to the
    end of the train.”—­Daily Mirror.

It doesn’t say whether the light-brown coiffeur was a page or the best man.

* * * * *

From an account of the British sailors’ reception in Paris:—­

    “Sous les clamations de la foule, les marins gagnent par les
    Champs-Elysees, la rue Royale et le boulevard Malesherbes, le Lycee
    Carnot, ou M. Breakfast les attend.”—­French Local Paper.

Hospitality personified!

* * * * *

AT THE PLAY.

“BUSINESS BEFORE PLEASURE.”

The return of Abe Potash and Mawruss Perlmutter to London is not an event to be regarded indifferently.  The light-hearted pair have evidently been through some anxious times. Rosie Potash can never have been a very easy woman to live with.  She has not improved.  And now that she has infected Ruth Perlmutter with her morbid jealousies the alert and as yet unbroken Mawruss begins to know something of what his long-suffering, not to say occasionally abject, partner, Abe, has had to endure these many years.

It was bad enough in the dress business.  But now they have gone into films it is indefinitely worse.  Every reasonable person must know that you can’t produce really moving pictures without an immense amount of late office hours, dining and supping out and that sort of thing, a fact which the Rosies and Ruths of this world can’t be expected to appreciate.  So that it would be as well, think the ingenuous entrepreneurs, if The Fatal Murder were, so far as the ladies’ parts are concerned, cast from members of the two households.  Besides, what an excellent way of keeping the money in the family.  However The Fatal Murder is a dud; Rosie and Ruth are not the right shape; and film acting, with the necessary pep, is not a thing you can just acquire by wishing so.

What is wanted, says the voluble young hustler in the firm, who alone seems to know anything of the business, is real actresses as distinguished from members of the directors’ families, and above all a good vampire.  A vampire is the very immoral and under-dressed type of woman that wrecks hearts and homes, and without which no film with a high moral purpose is conceivable.  You must have shadows to throw up the light.  And on this principle all the uplift and moral instruction of that potent instrument of grace, the cinematograph, is based—­a fact which will not have escaped the notice of cinema-goers.