MAY PUT TO HIM."

_Voice from Gallery_. "TELL US WHERE THERE'S A 'OUSE TO LET."]

* * * * *

MURMAN AMENITIES.

This was to have been an essay from an igloo, describing the
awful privations of the writer and the primitive savagery of his
surroundings on the Murman coast. It was to have wrung the sympathetic
heart of the public and at the same time to have enthralled the
student of barbaric life with its wealth of exotic detail. While
embodying all the best-known newspaper _cliches_ appropriated to these
latitudes it was to have included others specially and laboriously
prepared after a fascinating study of Arctic literature.

But circumstances have blighted its early inspiration, and the article
it was to have been will never be written, the telling word-pictures
designed on board the transport never executed.

Figure the disgust of five adventurers who, landing at the Murman
base, sternly braced to encounter the last extremity of peril and of
hardship, to sleep in the snow and dig one another out o' mornings,
to give the weakest of their number the warmest icicle to suck, the
longest candle to chew--found themselves billeted in a room which the
landladies of home would delight to advertise! Its walls were hung
with such pictures as give cheap lodgings half their horror; it was
encumbered with countless frail chairs and "kiggly" tables, and upon
every flat surface had settled a swarm of albums, framed photographs,
china dogs, wax flowers, penholder-stands, and all the choicest
by-products of civilization struggling towards culture. As we were not
to be frozen by exposure or immediately attacked by Bolshies, we might
reasonably have expected to be asphyxiated by the Russian stove; but
even this consolation was denied us, since Madame, convinced that
the English are mad in their love of fresh air, consented to leave it
unlit.

When first we arrived, five large soldiers with five large kits, the
aspect of the room filled us with terror. The fiercest frost or foe we
could have faced, but the bravest man may quail before wax-flowers and
fragile tables top-heavy with ornaments and knick-knacks, and all felt
that to encounter such things within the Arctic Circle was an unfair
test of our fortitude. Why had not the War Office or some newspaper
correspondent warned us?

Madame, however, proved to have a sense of proportion or humour; or
perhaps the collection was not her own. In any case