m
Are still beyond my means
(The same remark applies to butter-beans);

Yet milk (condensed) and salmon ("pink"),
And arrowroot and pines (preserved)--
All "easier," I am glad to think--
These, and a soul not yet unnerved,
Shall keep me going strong,
Now that the price of boots is not so long.

O. S.

* * * * *

GONE AWAY!

It seems to me that our local Hunt wants waking up. In some places, I
believe, there are still people who "cheerily rouse the slumbering morn"
by hunting the fox or the fox-cub, and, if one cannot let slumbering
morns lie, there is no jollier way of rousing them. But in our village
we hunt the 8.52. Morning after morning, if you watch from a high place,
you can see our bowlers and squash hats just above the hedgerows bobbing
down to the covert side. That one bobbing last is me.

As we trudge homeward under the star-lit skies all our racy anecdotes
are of the fine fast runs we have had with the 8.52, the brave swinging
of the tail carriage, the heavy work over the points, the check and find
again at East Croydon main.... Those who arrive early at the meet in the
morning (but, as I have hinted, I am not one of these) stroll about the
platform, I am told, talking of the rare old times when the 8.52 used to
be the 8.51, pulling out their watches every now and then and saying to
the station-master, "She's twenty-five seconds late," for all season
ticket-holders have special permission from the railway company to put
trains into the feminine gender. This is a slight compensation for
having to pay again when they are challenged and can only pull out a
complimentary pass to the Chrysanthemum Show.

As for myself, no one can say that I lack the sporting spirit, and if I
am late in the field it is because there is not enough noise and bustle
about our Hunt. It needs, I submit, the romantic colour and pageantry
that fire an Englishman's blood and rouse him irrevocably from his
marmalade.

In this connection, as we say so charmingly at our office, I have laid
certain preliminary proposals before Enderby and Jackson. A lot of the
sportsmen who hunt the 8.52 in our village do so in motor-cars, which is
hardly playing the game. Of the stout-hearted fellows who follow on
foot, both Enderby and Jackson pass in front of my house and may be
discerned dimly through a gap in the hedge, which was probably made for
that purpose by the previous tena