"Stop," said Slip. "Now, Tailer, think carefully before you answer my next question. Does he wear a yachting cap?"
"Yes, Sir," said Tailer, "that's it, Sir, 'e do wear a sort of sea 'at, Sir."
"This is very terrible," said Slip. "Are we his sole means of support? However—" and he drew a clean plate towards him and put a franc on it. The plate went slowly round the table and everyone subscribed. Stephen, who was immersed in a book on Mayflies, put in ten francs under the impression that he was subscribing towards the rent of the Mess. The Mandril appeared to have quite forgotten his dislike of beggars.
Tailer took the plate out and returned with it empty. "He's gone, Sir," he said.
"I'm glad for your sake, dear Mandril, that you have fallen in with our views," said Slip.
"What!" shouted the Mandril. "I quite forgot. A beggar!—the wretched impostor." He rushed to the window. An old man had rounded the corner of the house and was crossing the road on his way to a small café opposite.
"He's going to drink it," screamed the Mandril; "battery will fire a salvo;" and he seized two oranges from the sideboard. The first was a perfect shot and hit the target between the shoulder-blades, and the second burst with fearful force against the wall of the café. The victim turned and looked about him in a dazed fashion and then disappeared.
That night I received a note from Monsieur Le Roux, hardware merchant and incidentally our landlord, thanking me for sixteen francs seventy-five centimes paid in advance to his workman, and asking me to name a day on which he could call to mend our broken stove.
"It is not a little pathetic to observe that a year ago, and even two years ago, The Daily Mail was urging the Government then in power to introduce compulsory rations. Thus on November 13, 1916, we said: 'Ministers should at once prepare the organisation for a system of bread tickets. It took the diligent Germans six months to get their system into action, and it will take our ... officials quite as long. They ought to be getting to work on it now, not putting it off.'"—Daily Mail.