"Hullo, George! And when's the War going to be over, eh?"
THE QUESTIONABLE ALIEN.
William, my hitherto unventuresome friend William, is going abroad. I cannot be certain why. Perhaps he no longer feels his heroism equal to the strain of living in a country fit for heroes. It may be that he has unwittingly incubated a bacillus which figures in novels as the "Call of the Wild." Anyhow, William is going abroad—so much so that, if he went any farther, he would be on his way home again.
I need not say that I felt called upon to help William through this trying period, and our preparations proceeded satisfactorily until the clever geographers who arrange these things nowadays discovered that William could fetch the Far East by way of the Far West. Then the international complications set in. First, William's passport—a healthy enough document at the start—had to be carried round the diplomatic quarter of London until it broke out into a thick rash of supplementary visas. Next we sought out the moneychangers in their dens, to transmute William's viaticum bit by bit into four foreign currencies. Then a Great Power through whose territory William will have to pass apparently was nervous of his approach and instituted a grand inquisition into the status and antecedents of the Alien (William).
We unfolded the paper on our table and stared at it aghast. Its area was rather less than a square yard; in colour it favoured the yolk of bad eggs; while all over its broad expanse were ruled compartments, half of them filled with questions that no gentleman would ask another, the other half left blank for William's indignant replies. We managed with great difficulty to squeeze into the panel provided all his baptismal titles—there are four of these besides "William"—and then attacked the first real poser:—
Are you in possession of 100 dollars, or less? If less, by how much?