is
village from the mouth of the Hudson river to its present site should
finally convince the sceptics of the magnitude of America's war
effort.

***

The Vacant Land Cultivation Society offers a prize of ten shillings
for the heaviest potato. Some of our most notorious potato-tellers are
expected to compete.

***

The provision of steel helmets for the Metropolitan Police is all
right so far as it goes, but the Force is still asking why it cannot
be furnished with some protection for its other extremities.

***

From China it is reported that an aboriginal priest now claiming
the Throne has been accustomed to eat the flesh of tigers, wolves,
leopards, &c., also the human heart. It is, however, only fair to our
own restaurateurs to state that, though China is alleged to be on the
eve of war, there is as yet no food-control in that country.

***

An unusual scarcity of wasps is reported from various parts of the
country. Nothing is being done about it.

***

A calf has been sold for two thousand seven hundred guineas in
Aberdeenshire. The plucky purchaser is understood to have had for some
time past a craving for a veal cutlet.

***

A new form of frightfulness is evidently being practised upon their
guards by our interned Huns. "Some of them," says a contemporary,
"purchase a hundred cigars with a portion of the one pound a day which
is the miserable maximum they may spend on luxuries."

***

"People who speak of suicide seldom do anything desperate," says a
well-known mental expert. So that the KAISER'S threat to fight England
to the death may be taken for what it is worth.

***

An extraordinary meeting of German Reichstag Members has arrived at
the decision that the Germans cannot hope for victory in the field. We
see nothing extraordinary in this.

***

Professor BERGEN was once described as "the well-known inventor and
philanthropist." He still invents (his latest is a gas-thrower,
reported by the _Berliner Tageblatt_ to be "a veritable monster of
destruction"), but has dropped the other job.

***

A swallow-tail butterfly which escaped from the Zoo has been
re-captured at Eastbourne. When caught it gave the policeman to
understand that it would go quietly.

***

Two men, we read, took twenty-two hours to chisel a hole through the
three-foot flint concrete roof of the London Opera House. The report
that t