“That!” he rumbled in reply (he was one of the roarers among men), “why, that’s to stab scorpions with.”

They’ve buried him, I heard, in Flanders; on his breast (I hope), his cane.

“When a Red Cross platoon,” says a news despatch of the other day, “was advancing to the aid of scores of wounded men.  Surgeon William J. McCracken of the British Medical Corps ordered all to take cover, and himself advanced through the enemy’s fire, bearing a Red Cross flag on his walking-stick.”

Indeed, the Great War is one of the most thrilling, momentous and colourful chapters in the history of canes.  “The officers picked up their canes,” says the newspaper, and so forth, and so forth.  Captain A. Radclyffe Dugmore, in a spirited drawing of the Battle of the Somme, shows an officer leading a charge waving a light cane.  As an emblem of rank the cane among our Allies has apparently supplanted the sword.  Something of the dapper, cocky look of our brothers in arms on our streets undoubtedly is due to their canes.  One never sees a British, French or Italian officer in the rotogravure sections without his cane.  We should be as startled to see General Haig or the Prince of Wales without a cane as without a leg.  With our own soldiers the cane does not seem to be so much the thing, at least over here.  I have a friend, however, who went away a private with a rifle over his shoulder.  The other day came news from him that he had become a sergeant, and, perhaps as proof of this, a photograph of himself wearing a tin hat and with a cane in his hand.  It is also to be observed now and then that a lady in uniformed service appears to regard it as an added military touch to swing a cane.

Women as well as men play their part in the colourful story of the cane.  The shepherdess’s crook might be regarded as the precursor of canes for ladies.  In Merrie England in the age when the May-pole flourished it was fashionable, we know from pictures, for comely misses and grandes dames to sport tall canes mounted with silver or gold and knotted with a bow of ribbon.  The dowager duchess of romantic story has always appeared leaning upon her cane.  Do not we so see the rich aunt of Hawden Crawley?  And Mr. Walpole’s Duchess of Wrexe, certainly, was supported in her domination of the old order of things by a cane.  The historic old croons of our own early days smoked a clay or a corn-cob pipe and went bent upon a cane.

In England to-day it is swagger for women to carry sticks—­in the country.  And here the thoughtful spectator of the human scene notes a nice point.  It is not etiquette, according to English manners, for a woman to carry a cane in town.  Some American ladies who admire and would emulate English customs have not been made acquainted with this delicate nuance of taste, and so are very unfashionable when they would be ultra-fashionable.