Lest they should suffer from swelled head?

* * * * *

The “New” World.

["Direct Action,” which was regarded as a novelty suitable for an age of reconstruction, has now, by the good sense of the Trades Union Congress, been relegated to its proper place in the old and discredited order of things.]

  In these, the young Millennium’s years,
    Whereof they loudly boomed the birth,
  Promising by the lips of seers
    New Heavens and a brand-new Earth,
  We find the advertised attraction
    In point of novelty is small,
  And argument by force of action
    Would seem the oldest wheeze of all.

  When Prehistoric Man desired
    Communion with his maid elect,
  And arts of suasion left him tired,
    He took to action more direct;
  Scaring her with a savage whoop or
    Putting his club across her head,
  He bore her in a state of stupor
    Home to his stony bridal bed.

  In ages rather more refined,
    Gentlemen of the King’s highway,
  Whose democratic tastes inclined
    To easy hours and ample pay,
  Would hardly ever hold their victim
    Engaged in academic strife,
  But raised their blunderbuss and ticked him
    Off with “Your money or your life.”

  So when your miners, swift to scout
    The use of reason’s slow appeal,
  Threaten to starve our children out
    And bring the country in to heel,
  There’s nothing, as I understand it,
    So very new in this to show;
  The cave-man and the cross-roads bandit
    Were there before them long ago.

O.S.

* * * * *

Fair wear and Tear.

In a short time now we shall have to return this flat to its proper tenants and arrive at some assessment of the damage done to their effects.  With regard to the other rooms, even the room which Richard and Priscilla condescend to use as a nursery, I shall accept the owners’ estimate cheerfully enough, I think; but the case of the drawing-room furniture is different.  About the nursery I have only heard vague rumours, but in the drawing-room I have been an eye-witness of the facts.

The proper tenant is a bachelor who lived here with his sister; he will scarcely realise, therefore, what happens at 5 P.M. every day, when there comes, as the satiric poet, Longfellow, has so finely sung—­

  “A pause in the day’s occupations,
  Which is known as the children’s hour.”

Drawing-room furniture indeed!  When one considers the buildings and munition dumps, the live and rolling stock, the jungles and forests in that half-charted territory; when one considers that even the mere wastepaper basket by the writing-desk (and it does look a bit battered, that wastepaper basket) is sometimes the tin helmet under which Richard defies the frightfulness of Lars porsena, and sometimes a necessary stage property for Priscilla’s two favourite dramatic recitations