Ferdinand, Tsar of Bulgaria, great grandson of Philippe Egalite, finding Sofia unhealthy, has been recuperating at Vienna.  His future plans are vague, but it is thought he may join the ex-Kings’ Club in Switzerland.  Lenin, the Bolshevist Dictator, has recently experienced an attempt on his life, and retaliated in a fashion which would have done credit to a mediaeval despot.  England still refuses to indulge in joy bells or bunting, but the London police have seized the occasion to strike on the home front.  Their operations have been promptly if inconsistently rewarded by the removal of their chief and his elevation to the baronetcy.

Parliament is not sitting, and the voice of the Pro-Boche and the Pro-Bolsh is temporarily hushed.  We have to note, however, a most welcome rapprochement between Downing and Carmelite Streets—­the Daily Mail has praised the Foreign Office for an “excellent piece of work,” and the scapegoat, unexpectedly caressed, is sitting up and taking nourishment.

The harvest has been a success, thanks to the energy of the new land-workers, the armies behind the army: 

  All the talent is here—­all the great and the lesser,
    The proud and the humble, the stout and the slim,
  The second form boy and the aged professor,
    Grade three and the hero in want of a limb.

Four years of war have brought curious changes to “our village”: 

  Our baker’s in the Flying Corps,
    Our butcher’s in the Buffs,
  Our one policeman cares no more
    For running in the roughs,
  But carves a pathway to the stars
    As trooper in the Tenth Hussars.

  The Mayor’s a Dublin Fusilier,
    The clerk’s a Royal Scot,
  The bellman is a brigadier
    And something of a pot;
  The barber, though at large, is spurned;
    The Blue Boar’s waiter is interned.

  The postman, now in Egypt, wears
    A medal on his coat;
  The vet. is breeding Belgian hares,
    The vicar keeps a goat;
  The schoolma’am knits upon her stool;
    The village idiot gathers wool.

[Illustrations:  FARMER AND THE FARM LABOURER

First week

Second week

Third week

Fourth week]

The husbandman and his new help have undergone mutual transformation.  And our cadet battalions are making themselves very much at home at Oxford and Cambridge.

[Illustration:  CADET:  “Really, from the way these College Authorities make themselves at home you’d think the place belonged to them.”]

The Navy still remains the silent Service, but, as the need for reticence is being relaxed by the triumph of our arms, we are beginning to learn something, though unofficially as yet, of that “plaything of the Navy and nightmare of the Huns”—­the Q-boat: