you might have
fancied yourself back at Covent Garden, London, for the types of
well-turned-out men out-Englished the English, from top hat to
varnished boot."--_American Paper._

That's the worst of varnished boots; they will creak so.

* * * * *

[Illustration: UNMADE IN GERMANY.

BETHMANN-HOLLWEG. "AND TO THINK THAT I, WHO DEFENDED THE VIOLATION OF
BELGIUM, SHOULD HAVE MY HONESTY DOUBTED. SURELY I AM FRIGHTFUL ENOUGH."

(The Kaiser's Chancellor has been attacked in a German pamphlet which
ridicules his "silly ideas of humanity," and says that "nobody need be
surprised at the rumour which is going through Germany that he has been
bought by England.")]

* * * * *

[Illustration: _Sergeant_ (_after bringing his men to attention, to
knock-kneed recruit_). "WELL, THAT WINS IT, NO. 4. ALL YOU'VE GOT TO DO ON
THE COMMAND 'STAN' AT EASE' IS TO MOVE YER BLINKIN' 'ANDS."]

* * * * *

THE WATCH DOGS.

LV.

MY DEAR CHARLES,--Notwithstanding the reckless speed of the leave train and
the surfeit of luxuries and lack of company on the leave boat, our gallant
warriors continue to volunteer in thousands for that desperate enterprise
known as "Proceeding on leave to the U.K." There is however a certain
artfulness in the business, if only artfulness for artfulness' sake.

In the old days the ingenuity of man was concentrated upon extending by any
means short of the criminal the duration of the leave. When Robert first
went on leave he was young and innocent. He had four days given him; he
left his unit on the first of them and was back with it on the last of
them. The second time he improved on this and left France very early on the
morning of his first day and arrived in France again very late on the last
night of it. Then his friend John regarded _his_ leave as beginning and
ending in England, which, if the leave boat happens to be in mid-Channel at
midnight, is not a distinction without a difference. Robert's next leave
was for seven days, and he spent nine of them in the U.K. His explanation
was logically unassailable, but logic is wasted on military authorities;
after that, leave got fixed at ten days net, ten days of the inelastic
sort.

Give a man an inch and he'll take an ell; give him an ell and he is no man
if he doesn't improve even on that. Moreover, how is one to fill in the
dismal vacuum subsequent on t