Illustration: _Recruiting Officer._ "WHAT'S THE GOOD OF COMING HERE AND
SAYING YOU'RE ONLY SEVENTEEN YEARS OLD? GO AND WALK ROUND THAT YARD AND
COME BACK AND SEE IF YOU'RE NOT NINETEEN."

* * * * *

Illustration: "I 'OPES YER MISTESS'LL 'SCUSE ME BEIN' SO LATE WITH THE
WASHIN'. YER SEE, I DUSSENT COME IN DAYLIGHT FOR FEAR OF THE GOVERNMENT
PINCHIN' MY 'ORSE FOR THE WAR."

* * * * *

THE SAVING OF STRATFORD.

[_It has been decided, we gather, to go on playing SHAKSPEARE in Berlin,
because SHAKSPEARE is so closely connected with the German race._]

This was so good of you, so like your grace,
Ye on whose brows the brand of Rheims is graven,
To spare the poet of our common race
And find forgiveness for the Bard of Avon;
And all the little lore he feebly guessed,
Phantasy, rhetoric, and trope and sermon,
To clasp politely to your mailed breast,
Refine, transmute and render wholly German.

Seeing in _Henry V._ a Prussian King,
Tracing in _Hamlet_ a more moody KAISER,
You put new might into the master's wing,
He seems more wonderful to us, and wiser;
Not as he dimly sang in ages gone
He warbles to us now, but wild with culture,
Exchanging for the mere parochial Swan
The full-mouthed war notes of the Potsdam Vulture.

So shall he live, and live eternally
(In humble homage to the War Lord's mitten)
"This precious stone set in the silver sea,"
Heligoland, of course, and not Great Britain:
A thousand carven saints are lain in dust
In lands the Prussian Junker sets his boot on,
But WILHELM SHAKSPEARE and his honoured bust
Shall save themselves by being partly Teuton.

And when the hooves of those imperial swine
Leap, as of course they will, the ocean's borders,
And England's trampled down from Thames to Tyne,
And Wells is burnt, and Winchester, by orders,
It may be tears shall start into the eyes
Of helmed colonels in our Midland valleys,
And they shall spare the tomb where SHAKSPEARE lies;
He was a German (_Deutschland ueber alles_).

Almost I seem to see the Uhlans stand,
Paying their pious sixpences to enter
That little homestead of the Fatherland
That housed the dramatist in Stratford's centre;
A trifle flushed, maybe, with English beer,
But mutely reverent and not talking chattily,
They write beneath their names: "A friend liv