* * * * *

A correspondent having observed in a morning paper the headline, “Pomeranians Surrender!” sends us a suggested contents-bill for The Barking Gazette:—­

  GREAT CAPTURE OF POMS! 
  PEKINESE BREAK OFF RELATIONS. 
  GREAT DANES NEUTRAL. 
  RAID BY TERRITORIAL FLYING CORPS
    (SKY TERRIERS). 
  ROUT OF DALMATIANS. 
  FIELD-GREYHOUNDS DRIVEN OFF.

* * * * *

THE ADJUTANT ON LEAVE.

“Leave, I’m afraid,” remarked the Adjutant, standing with his back to the fire and hitching his bath towel more securely over his left shoulder, “can only be granted now in special circumstances.”

Flying being prevented for that afternoon by the weather conditions, we had been playing hockey, and the Adjutant, who by virtue of seniority had just had first go at the bathroom, was in a warm and expansive mood.  The rest of us sat about in his quarters awaiting our turns at a hot-water supply that would certainly cease to have anything warming or expansive about it by the time it reached the junior Second Lieutenant.

“The question is,” said that dejected officer, fixing the Adjutant with a watchful eye—­“the question is, what are you going to regard as special circumstances?”

“You state your circumstances to me officially to-morrow,” said the Adjutant cheerfully, “and I’ll tell you quickly enough whether they’re special or not,”

“I suppose,” suggested the Stunt Pilot, “that a wedding would be a pretty special sort of circumstance, wouldn’t it?”

“That depends,” replied the Adjutant.  “Are you thinking of getting married yourself?”

The Stunt Pilot said that he hadn’t been, but if there was any leave going with it he might think of it.

“One’s simply got to get leave somehow,” he complained.  “What about a breach of promise case?  Suppose I manage to get mixed up in a breach of promise case, wouldn’t that do?”

“That’s no good,” commented the Junior Officer gloomily.  “You’d have to get leave for something else first before you could manage it.”

“And if you did,” added the Adjutant severely, “you’d get leave for rather longer than you bargained for.”

“How about funerals?” put in the Equipment Officer hopefully.  “Funerals are a fairly sound stunt, aren’t they?”

“Funerals,” observed the Adjutant, “are played out.  If you come to me to-morrow and talk about dead uncles and things I shall have all sorts of inquiries made that will surprise you.  I’ve been had before by funerals.  When I was in the Army”—­the Adjutant talks like this since he was attached to the Flying Corps—­“when I was in the Army there was a fellow who used to come to the orderly-room and talk funerals to me until I was sick of the sight of him.  After some months of it I made him give me a written list of all his surviving relations, and then as he killed them off I used to scratch them out.  I caught him at last on his third grandmother.”