I wish Greening minor was here, it would do me Good to give the little Brute a regular licking. Fancy him Being in love with a Barmade and writing her verses. And Regger, who has the nerve to make up to his sister’s Jerman Governess. I can’t think why Fellows do such idiotic Things.
I Think rather than Have to marry Mrs. Clanarthur I would Run away and be a stoker like that Fellow in the newspapers. She looks quite young again this afternoon and her Hair is beautifully done, but I keep on seeing Her as she was at 4 this morning, when that pilot-cutter Found us.
I am getting rather sorry for Clanarthur tied up to a Woman who Boxes a Fellow’s ears and calls him Names for Nothing—that is, I should feel sorry for him if I was quite Eesy in my mind about his bringing an Axion for Divorse.
Ever your affeckshionate Brother,
Tynstone.
FOR VALOR!
THE city of Smutborough was holding a solemn public function in honor of one of her sons. Formerly a soldier in the Smutborough Regiment, he had won his V. C. a long time back in the early days of the last South African War. At the conclusion of hostilities, having, like many other men, attained perfect competency and ripe experience with the expiration of the age-limit, Color-Sergeant Stoneham was naturally shelved as being of no further use to the nation, except in an emergency like the last.
The rear of the Town Hall, Smutborough, formed one side of an unsavory blind alley: a dingy cul-de-sac blocked at the end by the high, sooty, spike-bordered wall of what was termed, with mordant but unconscious humor, the Workhouse Recreation Yard. The Workhouse loomed large upon the opposite side. Though the great main entrance for misery was in another street, a solid oaken door, hospitably garnished with large nails and a double row of bristling prongs, exhibited upon a mud-splashed fanlight above it the black-lettered legend, “Casual Ward.�
It was only one o’clock, and the door would not open before seven, but a queue of deplorable applicants had already mustered before it. A tall, upright, gaunt man of about forty, dressed in a weather-stained jacket-suit of tweed, and wearing a shabby deerstalker low over his haggard eyes, had been one of the last to attach himself to Poverty’s kite-tail.
Against the wall of the Workhouse Recreation Yard was the excuse for a considerable expenditure of public funds at a moment felt by the humbler citizens of Smutborough to be extremely inopportune. The excuse was let into the sooty brick masonry. It made a queerly-shaped bulge in the middle of an oppressively new Union Jack which covered it, and upon each side of this tantalizing mystery stood a large, pink, shining police-constable, in the largest size obtainable of brand-new white woolen gloves.
At the bottom of the blind alley were more constables, ready in case of the mob of unemployed making a rush round from the front of the Town Hall. But at present it surged, a human sea lashed to fury by the whip of hunger and the voice of Socialism, in the square outside the long row of first-floor windows where the sumptuous luncheon was laid for a hundred guests.