s
this: First catch your putter. Put the whole length of the shaft up your
sleeve. Then--but I must retain something for next Saturday's notes, and,
besides, I fancy the secretary of the Club where I am inditing these words
has his frugal eye on the consumption of the note-paper. But what I have
written I have written. _Litera scripta manet._

* * * * *

[Illustration: _Eminent London Architect_ (_submitting his designs to our
Village Victory Memorial Committee and warming to his work_). "...AND,
SURMOUNTING THE WHOLE, A GRACEFUL FIGURE OF VICTORY, WITH WREATH--SO."]

* * * * *

THE COALITION OF 1950.

"Aren't you being rather badly hit by the price of tobacco?" I asked
Charles, whose pipe is a kind of extra limb to him.

"I have just been composing the plot of a novel," he replied with apparent
irrelevance. "It begins something like this:--

"'Slowly and softly the violet dusk set in. The beautiful young Premiere
stood at the window of her yellow-and-black boudoir, gazing a little
wistfully at the almost deserted pavements of Downing Street. A white
pigeon perched--'"

"They aren't white," I said; "they're a sort of purply pinky grey."

"All right," said Charles, unmoved, "only it rather spoils the sentence. 'A
sort of purply pinky grey pigeon perched pompously--'"

"Never mind the pigeon," I said, "tell me what was the trouble with the
B.Y.P."

"A change in the leadership of the Opposition. The old leaderess had just
retired and her place had been taken by a new one, a man this time, young
and handsome as Apollo, who had thrown up the Chair of Cinematography at
the London University to plunge on to a political platform."

"What was the programme," I inquired, "of this--er--furniture-remover?"

"He was a reactionary," said Charles. "The Premiere's party had won a not
too sweeping victory at the polls on prohibition (not of alcohol, of
course--that had been done long ago--but of tobacco)."

"How on earth did she do it?"

"National economy, mostly," answered Charles. "She had the wives' vote
solid, and they carried the more docile of the husbands with them. She had
to throw out bribes to the unmarried electorate of both sexes, of course,
bribes which she had since been attempting to pay. Powder and chocolates
had been made cheaper. There was the Endowment of Cinemas Act of 1948, and
the Subsidized Football Bill of '49. But all these extravagan