RUS IN URBE.
The Selborne Society, which used to be a purely rural expeditionary force, has lately taken to exploring London, and personally-conducted tours have been arranged to University College in darkest Gower Street, where Sir PHILIP MAGNUS and Sir GREGORY FOSTER will act as guides, and to the Royal Courts of Justice, where Sir EDWARD MARSHALL HALL, K.C., "will describe the methods of conducting civil actions." What GILBERT WHITE would say to all this brick-and-mortar sophistication we do not dare to guess. All that we venture to do is to suggest one or two more urbane adventures.
Why, for example, should not a visit be paid to the House of Lords, under the direction of the new LORD CHANCELLOR? Five minutes spent on the Woolsack in such company not only would be a treasured memory, but a liberal (or, at any rate, a coalition) education. After such an experience all the Selbornians should come away better fitted to climb the ascents which life offers.
Again, if Sir HORACE MARSHALL, the Lord Mayor, invited the Society to the Mansion House they might be enormously benefited. Of turtle doves they naturally know all; GILBERT WHITE would have seen to that; but what do they know of turtle soup? Well, the LORD MAYOR would instruct them. He would show them the pools under the Mansion House where these creatures luxuriate while awaiting their doom; he would indicate the areas beneath the shell from some of which is extracted the calipash and from some the calipee; he might even induce the Most Worshipful Keeper of the Turtles, O.B.E., to discourse on the subject.
Then there is New Scotland Yard. It would be a scandal for the members of the Selborne Society not to visit that home of amity and see all the New Scots at work in tracking down the breakers of the laws that are made in the picturesque building with the clock tower so close by. And not very distant is the War Office, where mobilisation-while-you-wait may be studied at first hand, we don't think. Indeed, London offers such opportunities that we shall be surprised if the Selborne Society ever looks at a mole or a starling again.
THE ROAD TO THE RHINE.
BUSINESS LEAVE.
Of course we know demobilisation is proceeding apace. We know that pivotal men are simply pirouetting to England in countless droves. We know it because we see it in the papers (when they come), and it is a great source of comfort to us. But since it is six days' train journey and four days' lorry-hopping from where we sit guarding the wrong side of the river to the necessary seaport, perhaps they have forgotten us, or they are keeping all the pivots in this area for one final orgy of demobilisation at some future date, which for the moment I am not at liberty to disclose.