The puzzle form of our advice was not difficult to decipher, but, regardless of rhythm, many solvers gave the first line as
“If your clothing catch fire.”
A large number wrote “around” for “about” in line 2, failing to discern the essential difference, and several substituted “end” for “death” in the fourth line. For this latter reading we can find no justification.
In “A railway collision” the metre proved to be very troublesome. It is certainly very modern, the lines being respectively, nine, ten, eleven and twelve syllables long. We do not know the rule which governs such a metre, and are inclined to ascribe it that licence which every true poet sometimes takes.
Considering the difficulty, we were surprised to find from thirty to forty solutions giving the verse correctly. Three out of the four lines were not difficult to solve, but the progressive nature of the metre not being established, the first was not so easy. In many solutions an adjective was inserted before railway as:
“If a terrible railway collision you fear,”
and so long as some sort of rhythm was maintained, we did not much object.
A few competitors complained that the first picture in the last line was very obscure. In our copy it was plain enough and a large majority of solvers adopted “Spring,” in preference to any other reading.
One correspondent ventures to hope that ladies will be well assured of their peril before acting on the advice given. As he points out, it is not at all desirable that a carriageful of people should, for instance, be disturbed by such athletic exercises every time a fog-signal is heard.
Such a caution is perhaps, not wholly unnecessary, for there are people who “fear” a collision every time they enter a train.