And her mother retired to the sofa!

Shortly afterwards musketry instruction was proceeding in a public place; and behind the little group of learners sat Dot, in the seventh heaven of joy, drinking it all in with eager attention.  And the instructing officer did not seem to mind.

“How sad and mad and bad it was,” a theme for the moralist, the conscientious objector, the Army reformer, the social reformer, the statistician.  Yet perhaps even their solemn faces might relax to-day at the sight of a long-legged Airedale puppy marching at the head of the battalion to which she has appointed herself mascot.

* * * * *

QUIS CUSTODIET?

    “Engineer desires position as Manager of Works Manager.”—­The
    Aeroplane.

* * * * *

    “——­and Sons will sell by Auction four Shorthand and Jersey
    Cows.”

    Morning Paper.

As the FOOD CONTROLLER’S Department is said to be still short of clerks, he may like to bid for these accomplished creatures.

* * * * *

AT THE PLAY.

“FELIX GETS A MONTH.”

This “whimsical comedy,” made by Mr. LEON M. LION out of a novel by the late TOM GALLON, began in a distinctly intriguing mood. Felix had an uncle, a sport, on whom he had once played a scurvy practical joke.  This highly tolerant victim eventually cut up for a round million, which he left to nephew Felix on condition that he should enter Umberminster as naked as the day he was born and earn his living therein for a full calendar month—­a palpable posthumous hit to the old man. Felix accordingly, equipped as laid down in the will, is left by the family solicitor in a wood, and, after a night and a day in hiding, appears shivering at the Mayor’s parlour window, abstracts a rug for temporary relief, and prevails upon the maid, a romantic little orphan (who had been reading about river-gods and mistakes Felix for one), to borrow a suit of the Mayor’s clothes—­into which he gets in time to interview that worthy when he returns with his grim lady.  “You’ll get a month,” says she with damnable iteration; and the resourceful Felix, with an eye to the whimsical will, whimsically suggests that justice would be better fulfilled by his putting in the month at the Mayor’s house as odd-job man than by his being conveyed to the county jail.  And the Mayor whimsically agrees.

After that, I regret to say, honest whimsicality took wing, and the show became merely—­shall we say?—­eupeptic.  And certainly a much more elaborate meal than my lord DEVONPORT allowed me would be required to induce a mood sufficiently tolerant to face without impatience the welter which followed.  The three incredible people—­mercenary virgin, heavy father and aimless smiling villain—­that walked straight out of the Elephant and Castle into