Fair was the porridge in the days of peace,
  And still more fair the cream and sugar taken;
Plump were the twin poached eggs, yet not obese,
  Upon their thrones of toast, and crisp the bacon—­
I face their loss undaunted, unafraid,
If only I may keep my Marmalade.

An evening press without Callisthenes;
  A tables Staff; an immobile spaghetti;
A Shaw with whom the Common Man agrees;
  A Zambra searching vainly for Negretti;
When spades are trumps, a hand without a spade—­
So is my breakfast lacking Marmalade.

O Northcliffe (Lord)!  O Keiller!  O Dundee! 
  O Crosse and Blackwell, Limited!  O Seville! 
O orange groves along the Middle Sea! 
  (O Jaffa, for example) O the devil—­
Let Beef and Butter, Rolls and Rabbits fade,
But give me back my love, my Marmalade.

THE STORY THAT WENT WEST

“Why don’t you write a war story?” said Celia one autumn day when that sort of story was popular.

“Because everybody else does,” I said.  “I forget how many bayonets we have on the Western Front, but there must be at least twice as many fountain-pens.”

“It needn’t be about the Western Front.”

“Unfortunately that’s the only front I know anything about.”

“I thought writers used their imagination sometimes,” said Celia to anybody who might happen to be listening.

“Oh, well, if you put it like that,” I said, “I suppose I must.”

So I settled down to a story about the Salonica Front.

The scene of my story was laid in an old clay hut amid the wattles.

“What are wattles?” asked Celia, when I told her the good news.

“Local colour,” I explained.  “They grow in Bulgaria.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure that these ones did; I don’t know about any others.”

Of course more local colour was wanted than a mere wattle or two.  It was necessary therefore for my Bulgarians always to go about in comitadjis.  Celia thought that these were a kind of native trouser laced at the knee.  She may be right.  My own impression is that they are a species of platoon.  Anyhow the Bulgars always went about in them.

There was a fierce fight which raged round the old clay hut in the wattles.  The Greeks shouted “[Greek:  Tupto tuptomai]” The Serbs, for reasons into which I need not enter, were inarticulate with rage.  With the French and British I had, of course, no difficulty, and the Bulgars (fortunately) were content with hoarse guttural noises.  It was a fierce fight while it lasted, and I was sorry when it was over, because for the first time I began to feel at home with my story.  I need not say that many a Bulgar had licked the wattles before I had finished.

Unfortunately something else happened before I had finished.

“What do you think?” cried Celia, bursting into my room one evening, just when I was wondering whether my readers would expect to know more of the heroine’s native costume than that it was “simple yet becoming.”