“You been taking my missis for a walk,” said the indignant husband.

“I am a magistrate and a special constable—­” began Granby.

“More shame to you.  It’s the likes of you ’oo disgraces the upper clarses.”

“Shut the door, Bill,” said the lady.  “Don’t lower yourself by talking to ‘im.  I never could abide a man as smelt o’ gin meself.”

The door slammed and Granby strode towards me.

“The ingratitude of the lower classes is disgraceful.  I am tempted to despair of the State when I think of it.  The only way is to let these occurrences pass into oblivion, to set oneself resolutely to forget them as if they had never been.”

I agreed; but since then Granby has always eyed me curiously.  I think he suspects that I am not forgetting resolutely enough.

* * * * *

A Field Officer writes:  “Yesterday I was saluted by an Australian private.  It was a great day for me.”

* * * * *

[Illustration:  The white house mystery.

Uncle Sam.  “Say, John, shall we have A DOLLAR’S Worth?”]

* * * * *

[Illustration:  Enthusiast.  “As A patriot, madam, will you sign the Roll of Honour of ’the no-superfluous-travel-but-giv
e-up-your-Seats-to-soldiers-and-Sailors-as-much-as-possible League’?”]

* * * * *

The watch dogs.

LIV.

My Dear Charles,—­What about this Peace?  I suppose that, what with your nice new Governments and all, this is the very last thing you are thinking of making at the moment.  I wouldn’t believe that the old War was ever going to end at all if it wasn’t for the last expert and authoritative opinion I hear has been expressed by our elderly barber in Fleet Street.  At the end of July, 1914, he told me confidentially, as he snipped the short hairs at the back of my head, that there was going to be no war; the whole thing was just going to fizzle out.  Now he says it is going to be a very, very long business, as he always thought it would.

I find it difficult to maintain consistently either the detached point of view, in which one discusses it as if it was a European hand of bridge, or the purely interested point of view, in which one regards it only as a matter affecting one’s individual comfort.  I know a Mess, well up in the Front where they measure the mud by feet, in which they were discussing the War raging at their front door as if it had nothing to do with them beyond being a convenient thing to criticise.  Men who were