No doubt you would provide far better “copy”
    To the industrious drivers of the quill
  If you were more emotional and sloppy,
    More richly dowered with journalistic skill;
  To make despatches blossom like the poppy
    You never have essayed and never will;
  In short, you couldn’t earn a pound a week
  As a reporter on The Daily Shriek.

  Frugal in speech, yet more than once impelled
    To utter words of confidence and cheer,
  Whereat some dismal publicists rebelled
    As premature, ill-founded, insincere—­
  Words none the less triumphantly upheld
    By Victory’s verdict, resonantly clear,
  Words that inspired misgiving in the foe
  Because you do not prophesy—­you know;

  Steadfast and calm, unmoved by blame or praise,
    By local checks or Fortune’s strange caprices,
  You dedicate laborious nights and days
    To shattering the Hun machine to pieces;
  And howsoe’er at times the battle sways
    The Army’s trust in your command increases;
  Patient in preparation, swift in deed,
  We find in you the leader that we need.

* * * * *

    “The temperature in Berlin yesterday was 131 degrees Centigrade, which
    is the highest temperature since 1848.”—­Daily Dispatch.

Equal to about 268 degrees Fahr. and quite hot enough to keep the Imperial Potsdam boiling.

* * * * *

    “A correspondent who knows a great deal about the coat trade says there
    is going to be great difficulty in obtaining coal during the coming
    winter.”—­Torquay Times.

This will confirm the belief that the shortage of fuel is not unassociated with the vested interests.

* * * * *

    “We, on the other hand, are just as much entitled, under any sane code
    of morals, to bombard Kerman towns as to shoot German soldiers on the
    field.”—­The Globe.

We think, however, that the inhabitants of these Persian towns might reasonably object to such vicarious reprisals.

* * * * *

OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

(By Mr. Punch’s Staff of Learned Clerks.)

Our moorland novelists are of two schools.  One of them depicts the dwellers on these heights as a superior race, using a vocabulary half Biblical, half minor-poetic, in which to express the most exalted sentiments; the other draws a picture of upland domesticity comparable to that found in a cage of hyenas.  Mr. HALLIWELL SUTCLIFFE, though he is too skilled an artist to overdo the colouring, inclines (I am bound to say) so much towards the former method that I confess to an uneasy doubt, at times, whether any human families could maintain existence on the same plane of nobility as, for example, the Holts in his latest romance,