article of dress, are peculiarly related to the
mind. There is an old book-seller on Fourth Avenue whose clothes when
he dies, like the boots of Michelangelo, probably will require to be
pried loose from him, so incessantly has he worn them within the memory
of man. None has ever looked upon him in the open air without his
cane. And is not that emblem of omniscience and authority, the
schoolmaster's ferule, directly of the cane family? So large has the
cane loomed in the matter of chastisement that the word cane has become
a verb, to cane.

There was (in the days before the war) a military man (friend of mine),
a military man of the old school, in whom could be seen, shining like a
flame, a man's great love of a cane. He had lived a portion of his
life in South America, and he used to promenade every pleasant
afternoon up and down the Avenue swinging a sharply pointed,
steel-ferruled swagger-stick. "What's the use of carrying that
ridiculous thing around town?" some one said to him one day.

"That!" he rumbled in reply (he was one of the roarers among men),
"why, that's to stab scorpions with."

They've buried him, I heard, in Flanders; on his breast (I hope), his
cane.

"When a Red Cross platoon," says a news despatch of the other day, "was
advancing to the aid of scores of wounded men. Surgeon William J.
McCracken of the British Medical Corps ordered all to take cover, and
himself advanced through the enemy's fire, bearing a Red Cross flag on
his walking-stick."

Indeed, the Great War is one of the most thrilling, momentous and
colourful chapters in the history of canes. "The officers picked up
their canes," says the newspaper, and so forth, and so forth. Captain
A. Radclyffe Dugmore, in a spirited drawing of the Battle of the Somme,
shows an officer leading a charge waving a light cane. As an emblem of
rank the cane among our Allies has apparently supplanted the sword.
Something of the dapper, cocky look of our brothers in arms on our
streets undoubtedly is due to their canes. One never sees a British,
French or Italian officer in the rotogravure sections without his cane.
We should be as startled to see General Haig or the Prince of Wales
without a cane as without a leg. With our own soldiers the cane does
not seem to be so much the thing, at least over here. I have a friend,
however, who went away a private with a rifle over his shoulder. The
other day came news from him that he had become a ser