One fine spring afternoon Eliphaz Griggs was speaking at his usual place and time; he had wound himself up wonderfully. ``You are damned,’’ he was saying, ``for ever and ever and ever.  Your sins have found you out.  Your filthy lives will be as fuel round you and shall burn for ever and ever.’’

``Look here,’’ said a Canadian soldier in the crowd, ``we shouldn’t allow that in Ottawa.’’

``What?’’ asked an English girl.

``Why, telling us we’re all damned like that,’’ he said.

``Oh, this is England,’’ she said. ``They may all say what they like here.’’

``You are all damned,’’ said Ezekiel, jerking forward his head and shoulders till his hair flapped out behind. ``All, all, all damned.’’

``I’m damned if I am,’’ said the Canadian soldier.

``Ah,’’ said Ezekiel, and a sly look came into his face.

Eliphaz flamed on. ``Your sins are remembered.  Satan shall grin at you.  He shall heap cinders on you for ever and ever.  Woe to you, filthy livers.  Woe to you, sinners.  Hell is your portion.  There shall be none to grieve for you.  You shall dwell in torment for ages.  None shall be spared, not one.  Woe everlasting...  Oh, I beg pardon, gentlemen, I’m sure.’’ For the Pacifists’ League had been kept waiting three minutes.  It was their turn to-day at four.

Nature’s Cad

The claim of Professor Grotius Jan Beek to have discovered, or learned, the language of the greater apes has been demonstrated clearly enough.  He is not the original discoverer of the fact that they have what may be said to correspond with a language; nor is he the first man to have lived for some while in the jungle protected by wooden bars, with a view to acquiring some knowledge of the meaning of the various syllables that gorillas appear to utter.  If so crude a collection of sounds, amounting to less than a hundred words, if words they are, may be called a language, it may be admitted that the Professor has learned it, as his recent experiments show.  What he has not proved is his assertion that he has actually conversed with a gorilla, or by signs, or grunts, or any means whatever obtained an insight, as he put it, into its mentality, or, as we should put it, its point of view.  This Professor Beek claims to have done; and though he gives us a certain plausible corroboration of a kind which makes his story appear likely, it should be borne in mind that it is not of the nature of proof.

The Professor’s story is briefly that having acquired this language, which nobody that has witnessed his experiments will call in question, he went back to the jungle for a week, living all the time in the ordinary explorer’s cage of the Blik pattern.  Towards the very end of the week a big male gorilla came by, and the Professor attracted it by the one word ``Food.’’ It came, he says, close to the cage, and seemed prepared to talk but became very angry on seeing a man there, and beat the cage