So you make your mine by begging—­(modern miners never dig),—­
    And you float a gorgeous Company.  The shares go spinning up;
  But you never “rig the market.” (What an awkward word is “rig"!)
    And you drain success in bumpers from an overflowing cup.

  Then one day the thing gets shaky, and it goes from bad to worse,
    And the public grasps a shadow where it tried to hold a share;
  And in vain the country clergy most unclerically curse,
    You have “realised your property,” and end a millionnaire.

* * * * *

COMING SEA-SCRAPES AT CHELSEA.

(DRAWN BY AN INSIDER.)

MR. PUNCH, SIR,

That the sister Service should also have its turn at Chelsea I reckon I can understand, and the Show ought to be popular; but if the Admiralty want to make a further “exhibition” of themselves, they won’t have to go very far a-field for material.  Here are one or two exhibits that come to hand at once.  First, there’s those big guns which it ain’t safe to fire nohow, and which, if you do load with half a charge, crack, bend, and get sent back to be “ringed” up, whatever that means, and are not safe, even for a salute, ever afterwards.  Then, in another case, they might show a foot or two of that blessed boiler-piping which is always leaking, or splitting, or bursting, just when it shouldn’t.  In a third they might display a chop that had been cooked from lying exposed in one of those famous stokeholes where the poor beggars of sailors are expected to pass their time without getting roasted too.  Then there might be, as a sort of prize puzzle, a plan of these here recent manoeuvres, with the Umpire’s opinion of the whole blessed jumble tacked on to it.  Then, to enliven the proceedings.  Lord GEORGE might take his turn with the rest of the Admiralty Board, and give us, every half hour or so, a figure or two of the Hornpipe, just to let the public see that they have got some sort of nautical “go” about them to warrant them in drawing their big screw.  Bless you, Mr. Punch, there’s lots to make an Exhibition of at Chelsea next year if you come to calculate.  Leastways that’s the opinion of your humble servant and admirer,

A TAX-PAYING LANDLUBBER.

* * * * *

ON GUARDS!

THE BAD FORM OF THE PAST.

[Illustration]

There he stood in his evening dress, with a half-smoked cigarette between his lips.  He had been knocking about Piccadilly all day, had dined at the Junior, looked in at the Opera, and finished at the Steak.  He seemed a civilian of civilians.  The most casual observer would have declared that he could never have seen the inside of a barrack-yard.  So no surprise was expressed when the question was asked him.

“What am I?” he repeated, languidly, and then he replied, with a yawn, “Can’t you see, old Chappie?  Why, an Officer in the Guards!”