e oven or the barrel;
Scarcely you figure in my eye
As liable, in Nature's course, to die.

And it was you who almost fell from grace,
Striking, like Lucifer, against authority,
Leaving your Heaven for another place
Not mentioned by your ten-to-one majority,
And doomed, to your surprise and pain,
Never, like Lucifer, to rise again.

But you were wise, my Robert, wise in time;
And I, who set you far above humanity,
High-pedestalled upon my lofty rhyme,
Rejoice with you in your recovered sanity;
To me I feel it would have mattered
Enormously to see my idol shattered.

But 'ware the Bolsh, who fain would lure your feet
To conduct unbecoming in a copper;
Once you betrayed us, going off your beat,
And now you've nearly come another cropper;
If, tempted thrice, you break your trust,
You'll have no halo left to readjust.

O.S.

* * * * *

EMBARRASSMENT AND THE LAWYER.

Watson is a young barrister who is feeling rather pleased with himself.
I confess that he has deserved it.

The situation was as follows. Before the War he had had no briefs, but
had always had a conscience. A hopeless state of affairs. Then he went
to the War and shed his conscience somewhere in the Balkans. So far so
good. But, when he was demobilised and began to take stock of what had
been happening at home in the meanwhile, he found to his horror that a
conscience had again been thrust upon him by the General Council of the
Bar.

Such was the situation he had to face, and he has won through.

How, you ask, did the G.C.B. play this trick on him? It happened in
this way. Having nothing better to do during Watson's absence and at a
critical moment of the War, these idle elderly well-fed lawyers solemnly
deliberated upon the following fantastic problem:--

"What is the duty of counsel who is defending a prisoner on a plea of
Not Guilty when the prisoner confesses to counsel that he did commit the
offence charged?"

With a cynical disregard of their own past these sophists propounded the
following answer:--

"If the confession has been made before the proceedings have been
commenced it is most undesirable that an advocate to whom the confession
has been made should undertake the defence, as he would most certainly
be seriously embarrassed in the conduct of the case, and no harm can be
done to the accused by requesting him to retain another advocate."

Th