present, rocking the Empire to its base, make one long for the spacious days of a Salisbury or a Queen Elizabeth, or an Alfred the Great or a Julius Cæsar. We doubt whether the present Cabinet is in this class.

Not to lose any time in the coming and going of the mail-always a serious thought for the contributor to the press waiting for a check-I sent another editorial on the same topic to the Manchester Guardian. It ran as follows:

The action of the Shriek of Kowfat in proclaiming a jehad against us is one that amply justifies all that we have said editorially since Jeremy Bentham died. We have always held that the only way to deal with a Mohammedan potentate like the Shriek is to treat him like a Christian. The Khalifate of Kowfat at present buys its whole supply of cotton piece goods in our market and pays cash. The Shriek, who is a man of enlightenment, has consistently upheld the principles of free trade. Not only are our exports of cotton piece goods, bibles, rum, and beads constantly increasing, but they are more than offset by our importation from Kowfat of ivory, rubber, gold, and oil. In short, we have never seen the principles of free trade better illustrated. The Shriek, it is now reported, refuses to wear the braces presented to him by our envoy at the time of his coronation, five years ago. He is said to have thrown them into the mud. But we have no reason to suppose that this is meant as a blow at our prestige. It may be that after five years of use the little pulleys of the braces no longer work properly. We have ourselves, in our personal life, known instances of this, and can speak of the sense of irritation occasioned. Even we have thrown on the floor ours. And in any case, as we have often reminded our readers, what is prestige? If anyone wants to hit us, let him hit us right there. We regard a blow at our trade as far more deadly than a blow at our prestige.

The situation as we see it demands imme

diate reparation on our part. The principal grievance of the Shriek arises from the existence of our fort and garrison on the Kowfat River. Our proper policy is to knock down the fort, and either remove the garrison or give it to the Shriek. We are convinced that as soon as the Shriek realizes that we are prepared to treat him in the proper Christian

spirit, he will at once respond with true Mohammedan generosity.

We have further to remember that in what we do we are being observed by the neighboring tribes the Negritos, the Dwarf Men, and the Dog Men of Darfur. These are not only shrewd observers, but substantial customers. The Dwarf Men at present buy all their cotton on the Manchester market, and the Dog Men depend on us for their soap.

The present crisis is one in which the nation needs statesmanship and a broad outlook upon the world. In the existing situation we need not the duplicity of a Machiavelli, but the commanding prescience of a Gladstone, or an Alfred the Great, or a Julius Cæsar. Luckily, we have exactly this type of man at the head of affairs.

After completing the above I set to work without delay on a similar exercise for the London Times. The special excellence of the Times, as everybody knows, is its fullness of information. For generations past the Times has commanded a peculiar minuteness of knowledge about all parts of the Empire. It is the proud boast of this great journal that to whatever far-away outlandish part of the Empire you may go, you will always find a correspondent of the Times looking for something to do. It is said that the present proprietor has laid it down as his maxim, "I don't want men who think; I want men who know." The arrangements for thinking are made separately.

Incidentally, I may say that I had personal opportunities, while I was in England, of realizing that the reputation of the Times's staff for the possession of information is well founded. Dining one night with some members of the staff, I happened to mention Saskatchewan. One of the editors at the other end of the table looked up at the mention of the name. "Saskatchewan," he said. "Ah yes; that's not far from Alberta, is it?" and then turned quietly to his food again. When I remind the reader that Saskatchewan is only half an inch from Alberta, he may judge of the nicety of the knowledge involved. Having all this in mind, I recast the editorial and sent it to the London Times as follows:

The news that the Sultan of Kowfat has thrown away his suspenders renders it of interest to indicate the exact spot where he has thrown them. (See map.) Kowfat, lying, as the reader knows, on the Kowfat River, occupies the hinterland between the back end of southwest Somaliland and the east-that is to say, the west-bank of Lake P'schu. It thus forms an enclave between the Dog Men of Darfur and the Negritos of T'chk. The inhabitants of Kowfat are a colored race, three-quarters negroid and more than three-quarters tabloid.

As a solution of the present difficulty, the first thing required, in our opinion, is to send out a boundary commission to delineate more exactly still just where Kowfat is. After that an ethnographical survey might be completed.

It was a matter not only of concern, but of surprise, to me that not one of the three contributions recited above was accepted by the English press. The Morning Post complained that my editorial was not firm enough in tone; the Guardian, that it was not humane enough; the Times, that I had left out the latitude and longitude, always expected by their readers.

I thought it not worth while to bother to revise the articles as I had meantime conceived the idea that the same material might be used in the most delightful, amusing way as the basis of a poem for Punch. Everybody knows the kind of verses that are contributed to Punch by Sir Owen Seaman and Mr. Charles Graves and men of that sort. And everybody has been struck, as I have, by the extraordinary easiness of the performance. All that one needs is to get some odd little incident, such as the revolt of the Sultan of Kowfat, make up an amusing title, and then string the verses together in such a way as to make rhymes with all the odd words that come into the narrative. In fact, the thing is ease itself.

I therefore saw a glorious chance with the Sultan of Kowfat. Indeed, I fairly chuckled to myself when I thought what amusing rhymes could be made with "negritos," "modus operandi," and

"Dog Men of Darfur." I can scarcely imagine anything more excruciatingly funny than the rhymes which can be made with them. And as for the title, bringing in the word Kowfat or some play upon it, the thing is perfectly obvi

ous. The idea amused me so much that I set to work at the poem at once. I am sorry to say that I failed to complete it; not that I couldn't have done so, given time; I am quite certain that if I had had about two years I could have done it. The main structure of the poem, however, is here, and I give it for what it is worth. Even as it is it strikes me as extraordinarily good. Here it is:

Excellent little thing, isn't it? All it needs is the rhymes. As far as it goes it has just exactly the ease and the sweep required. And if some one will tell me how Owen Seaman and those people get the rest of the ease and the sweep I'll be glad to put it in.

One further experiment of the same sort I made with the English press in another direction and met again with failure. If there is one paper in the world for which I have respect and-if I may say it-an affection, it is the London Spectator. I suppose that I am only one of thousands and thousands of people who feel this way. Why, under the circumstances, the Spectator failed to publish my letter I cannot say. I wanted no money for it; I only wanted

DEAR SIR,-Your correspondence of last week contained such interesting information in regard to the appearance of the first cowslip in Kensington Common that I trust that I may, without fatiguing your readers to the point of saturation, narrate a somewhat similar, and I think, sir, an equally interesting experience of my own. While passing through Lambeth Gardens yesterday, toward the hour of dusk, I observed a crow with one leg sitting beside the duck pond and apparently lost in thought. There was no doubt that the bird was of the species Pulex hibiscus, an order which is becoming singularly rare in the vicinity of the metropolis. Indeed, so far as I am aware, the species has not been seen in London since 1680. I may say that on recognizing the bird I drew as near as I could, keeping myself behind the shrubbery, but the Pulex hibiscus, which apparently caught a brief glimpse of my face, uttered a cry of distress and flew away. I am, sir,

Believe me,

Yours, sir,

O. Y. BOTHERWITHIT (Ret'd major, Burmese army).

Distressed by these repeated failures, I sank back to a lower level of English literary work, the puzzle department. For some reason or other, the English delight in puzzles. It is, I think, a part of the peculiar schoolboy pedantry which is the reverse side of their literary genius. I speak with a certain bitterness because, in puzzle work, I met with success whatever. My solutions were never acknowledged, never paid for; in fact, they were ignored. But I append two or three of them here, with apologies to the editors of the Strand

no

and other papers who should have had the honor of publishing them first.

PUZZLE I

Can you fold a square piece of paper in such a way that with a single fold it forms a pentagon?

My Solution.-Yes, if I knew what a pentagon was.

PUZZLE II

A and B agree to hold a walking match across an open meadow, each seeking the shortest line. A, walking from corner to corner, may be said to diangulate the hypotenuse of the meadow. B, allowing for a slight rise in the ground, walks on an obese tabloid. Which wins?

My Solution. Frankly, I don't know.

PUZZLE III

(With apologies to the Strand)

A rope is passed over a pulley.. It has a weight at one end and a monkey at the other. There is the same length of rope on either side, and equilibrium is maintained. The rope weighs four ounces per foot. The age of the monkey and the age of the monkey's mother together total four years. The weight of the monkey is as many pounds as the monkey's mother is years old. The monkey's mother was twice as old as the monkey was when the monkey's mother was half as old as the monkey will be when the monkey is three times as old as the monkey's mother was when the monkey's mother was three times as old as the monkey. The weight of the rope and the weight at the end was half as much again as the difference in weight between the weight of the weight and the weight of the monkey. Now, what was the length of the rope?

My Answer.-I should think it would have to be a rope of a fairly good length.

In only one department of English journalism have I met with a decided measure of success-I refer to the juvenile competition department. This is a line of thing to which the English are especially addicted. As a really educated nation for whom good literature begins in the home, they encourage in every way literary competitions among the young readers of their journals. At least half a dozen of the well-known London

IT

T was on the sunny veranda of a seaside hotel, overlooking a pattern of flower beds and a strip of blue sea, that Horne Fisher and Harold March had their final explanation, which might be called an explosion.

Harold March, now famous as one of the first political writers of his time, had come to the little table and sat down at it with a subdued excitement smoldering in his somewhat cloudy and dreamy blue eyes. In the newspapers which he tossed from him on to the table there was enough to explain some, if not all, of his emotion. Public affairs in every department had reached a crisis. The Government which had stood so long that men were used to it, as they are used to a hereditary despotism, had begun to be accused of blunders and even of financial abuses. Some said that the experiment of attempting to establish a peasantry in the west of England, on the lines of an early fancy of Horne Fisher's, had resulted in nothing but dangerous quarrels with more industrial neighbors. There had been particular complaints of the ill-treatment of harmless foreigners, chiefly Asiatics, who happened to be employed in the new scientific works constructed on the coast. Indeed, the new Power which had arisen in Siberia, backed by Japan and other powerful allies, was inclined to take the matter up in the interests of its exiled subjects, and there had been wild talk about ambassadors and ultimatums. But something much more serious, in its personal interests for March himself, seemed to fill his meeting with his friend with a mixture of embarrassment and indignation. Perhaps it increased his annoyance

that there was a certain unusual liveliness about the usually languid figure of Fisher. The ordinary image of him in March's mind was that of a pallid and bald-browed gentleman, who seemed to be prematurely old as well as prematurely bald. He was remembered as a man who expressed the opinions of a pessimist in the language of a lounger. Even now March could not be certain whether the change was merely a sort of masquerade of sunshine, or that effect of clear colors and clean-cut outlines that is always visible on the parade of a marine resort, relieved against the blue dado of the sea. But Fisher had a flower in his buttonhole, and his friend could have sworn he carried his cane with something almost like the swagger of a fighter. With such clouds gathering over England, the pessimist seemed to be the only man who carried his own sunshine.

"Look here," said Harold March, abruptly, "you've been no end of a friend to me, and I never was so proud of a friendship before; but there's something I must get off my chest. The more I found out, the less I understood how you could stand it. And I tell you I'm going to stand it no longer."

Horne Fisher gazed across at him gravely and attentively, but rather as if he were a long way off.

"You know I always liked you," said Fisher, quietly, "but I also respect you, which is not always the same thing. You may possibly guess that I like a good many people I don't respect. Perhaps it is my tragedy, perhaps it is my fault. But you are very different, and I promise you this: that I will never try to keep you as somebody to