Stewardess. "We are just nearing the harbour, Madam. Would you like some hot water?"
Passenger (faintly). "It doesn't matter, thank you; I'm only going to relations."
LETTERS AND LIFE.
Preparations are already on foot for the great banquet to be given in honour of the famous Russian novelist, Dr. Ladislas Plovskin, who is to visit England in July. A representative committee has been formed, which includes, amongst others, Sir Gilbert Parker, Mr. Charles Garvice, Mr. Silas Hocking, Mr. C. K. Shorter, Lord Dunsany, Mr. James Douglas and Mr. Edmund Gosse, who will take the chair at the banquet. There is a peculiar appropriateness in this, for it was Mr. Gosse who, some ten years ago, first called attention to Plovskin in one of his masterly studies. Since then, Plovskin has gained the Nobel Prize and become the object of a special cult which has centres from Tomsk to Seattle, and from Popocatapetl to Oshkosh.
The address which will be presented to the great Muscovite fictionist has been written by Mr. James Douglas, and is a masterpiece of sensitive and discriminating eulogy. Thus in one passage Mr. Douglas says, "while preserving your own individuality with miraculous independence, you have summed up in your work all the inchoate influences to be found in Homer, Dante, Shakspeare, Voltaire and Verlaine, and carried them to a pitch of divine effulgence only to be equalled in the godlike work of our marvellous Masefield."
Dr. Plovskin is no stranger to England, for he was an intimate friend of the late Edward Lear, who alludes to him under the name of Ploffskin in one of his touching lyrics, and, as we have seen, he owes almost everything to the generous appreciation of Mr. Gosse, to whom he has dedicated his last novel, which bears the fascinating title of The Bad Egg. Portions of this, it is to be hoped, will be recited at the banquet by the author's brother-in-law, Mr. Ossip Bobolinsky, Managing Director of the Anglo-Manchurian Steam Tar Company.
In smart intellectual circles Tagore Teas are now all the rage. At these elegant and up-to-date entertainments China tea is absolutely proscribed, the refreshments, solid and liquid, being exclusively of Indian origin. After tea the guests cantillate passages from the prose and poetry of the Great Indian Master to the accompaniment of gongs (the Sanskrit tum-tum) and one-stringed Afghan jamboons, for the space of two or three hours, when their engagements permit. Sometimes the reading is varied by mystical dances of a slow and solemn character, but all laughter, levity and exuberance are sedulously discountenanced, the aim of all present being to attain an attitude of serene and complacent ecstasy which enables them to invest utterances of the most perfect ineptitude with a portentous and pontifical significance.