Chapter I: COURTED the Muse as a stripling,

Immured in a Bloomsbury flat,
And yearned for the kudos of KIPLING
For fees that were frequent and fat;
But editors, far from discerning
The worth of the pearls that I placed
At their feet, had a way of returning
The same with indelicate haste.

But, espousing, a year or two later,
The sweetest and neatest of wives,
I found, after peeling a tater
Or imparting a polish to knives,
I could scribble with frenzy and passion,
That the breaking of coal would inspire,
In a truly remarkable fashion,
My soul with celestial fire.

Serenity reigns in the household;
I've cancelled my grudge against Fate;
My lyrical efforts are now sold
At a simply phenomenal rate;
And, whether I'm laying the lino
Or bathing the babes, I regard
The job as a cushy one: _I_ know
The way to succeed as a bard.

* * * * *

SIR ROBERT HORNE. "I WANT TO KEEP THE BALANCE. NOW THEN, BOTH TOGETHER."

THE MINER. "NO. _YOU_ BEGIN--AND THEN PERHAPS I'LL THINK ABOUT IT."]

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* * * * *

ESSENCE OF PARLIAMENT.

_Tuesday, October 19th._--A start was made with half a hundred Questions, and, considering that most of them had been in cold storage since before the Recess, it was surprising how fresh they remained. Persia and Mesopotamia--not to mention Ireland--are still unsettled; the Turkish Treaty is not yet ratified; the cost of living continues to rise, and the ratio of unemployment has alarmingly advanced, especially in the case of ex-service men.

These last are to be found work in the building trades, with, it is hoped, the assistance of the trade unions, but, if that hope is disappointed, then without it. The country requires half-a-million houses built. "Here are men who could assist," said the PRIME MINISTER, "and we propose that they should be allowed to assist."

Over a prospect already sufficiently bleak there broods the shadow of the coal-strike. Sir ROBERT HORNE, in presenting the case for the Government, was admirably clear but, perhaps naturally, a little cold. Only when the new lighting arrangement had flooded the House with artificial sunshine did the Minister warm up a little and hint that a way of peace might yet be found.

I wonder if it was by accident or artifice that Mr. BRACE began his plea for the miners with the admission that they had only dropped the demand for the reduction of fourteen shillings and twopence in the price of domestic coal when they discovered that "the money was not there." Anyhow the laughter that ensued served to put Members into a good temper and to cause them to lend a friendly ear to his suggestion that the two shillings advance, though in his view only "dust in the balance," should be "temporarily" conceded, pending the establishment of a tribunal which should permanently settle the conditions of the mining industry. The increase of output which everyone desired would then be brought about.

Most of the speakers who followed seemed to think that Mr. BRACE had sown the seed of a settlement. It was left to the PRIME MINISTER, who evidently did not relish the task, to awaken the House from its beautiful dream. He pointed out that to accept the proposal would be to give the miners what they had originally claimed, without any guarantee that the greater output would be forthcoming. If it were not forthcoming and the two shillings were taken away, what would happen? "A strike," cried someone. "Precisely," said Mr. LLOYD GEORGE; only it would have been provoked by the Government instead of by the miners. He was not prepared to do business on those lines.

And so the debate came to an end rather than a conclusion.

_Wednesday, October 20th._--The Peers plunged into the morasses of the Irish Question. Lord CREWE asked for an official inquiry into the alleged "reprisals" and particularly instanced the attacks upon the creameries. Rather than that Ireland should be "pacified" by such methods as these he would see her engaged in civil war, "fairly conducted on both sides." From these words it may be gathered that his lordship's knowledge of civil war is happily not extensive.

Furnished with a voluminous brief from the Irish Office, Lord CURZON made a long reply, the purport of which was that many of the reprisals were bogus, many were actions undertaken in self-defence, while the rest were generally due to men "seeing red" after their comrades had been brutally murdered. The Government did not palliate such cases, and had instituted inquiries and taken disciplinary action against the offenders, when known; but they were not prepared to set up a public inquiry such as Lord CREWE had demanded. It would only substitute "a competition in perjury" for the present "competition in murder"--a somewhat infelicitous phrase by which, as he subsequently explained, he did not mean to imply, as Lord PARMOOR suggested, that police and rebels were engaged in a murderous rivalry.

Simultaneously the House of Commons was engaged upon an identically similar debate. Mr. ARTHUR HENDERSON was as lugubrious as Lord CREWE in presenting the indictment and distinctly less adroit in selecting his facts. His theory was that the Government had provoked the Sinn Fein outrages by its treatment of the people. Why, women had been prevented from taking their eggs to market!

Sir HAMAR GREENWOOD spoke from the same brief as Lord CURZON, but threw far more passion and vigour into its recital. There had been some reprisals, he admitted, but they were as nothing compared to the horrors that had provoked them; and he protested against the notion that "the heroes of yesterday"--the R.I.C. is mainly recruited from ex-service men--had turned into murderers. As for the creameries, he had never seen a tittle of evidence that they had been destroyed by servants of the Crown, and he warned the House not to believe the stories put out by the propaganda bureau of the Irish Republican Army. He was still a convinced Home Ruler--an Ulster hot-gospeller had accused him of being a Sinn Feiner with a Papist wife!--but the first thing to do was to break the reign of terror and end the rule of the assassin. That they were doing, and there was no case for Mr. HENDERSON'S "insulting resolution."

The Opposition for the moment seemed stunned by the CHIEF SECRETARY'S sledge-hammer speech. No one rose from the Front Bench and Lieutenant-Commander KENWORTHY had to overcome his modesty and step into the breach. Later on, Lord ROBERT CECIL, on the strength of information supplied by an American journalist, supported the demand for an inquiry. So did Mr. ASQUITH, on the ground that it would be in the interests of the Government of Ireland itself; but this argument was obviously weakened by Mr. BONAR LAW'S reminder that in 1913 and 1914 Mr. ASQUITH himself had deprecated inquiries in somewhat similar circumstances. The Government had a very good division, 346 to 79; but there were many abstentions.

_Thursday, October 21st._--It was, no doubt, by way of brightening an unutterably gloomy week that Mr. L'ESTRANGE MALONE, who has not hitherto been known as a humourist, invited the Government to intercede at Washington for the release of the notorious JAMES LARKIN, now languishing in an American gaol. Inasmuch as LARKIN had been convicted for having advocated the overthrow of the United States by violence, Mr. HARMSWORTH did not think H.M. Government were called upon to intervene. Mr. MALONE understood from this that the Government had no sympathy with British subjects in foreign lands, and so he got another laugh.

Commander BELLAIRS thought it would be a good idea if the League of Nations, pending the discharge of its more important functions, were to offer rewards for world-benefiting discoveries such as a prophylactic against potato-blight. Sir JOHN REES saw his chance and took it. "Does the League," he inquired, "declare to win on Phosphates, Peace or Potatoes?"--thus supplying proof positive that he owes his precise pronunciation to past practice with "prunes and prisms."

It was rather impudent of Mr. ADAMSON, who has just been instrumental in throwing out of work some hundreds of thousands of his fellow-citizens, to initiate a debate on unemployment. Most of the speakers endeavoured to throw the blame on "the other fellow"--the Government on the trade unions, the trade unionists on the employers, and the employers on the Government. A welcome exception was Mr. HOPKINSON, who boldly blamed the short-sighted selfishness of some of his own class. Employes would not work their hardest to "make the boss a millionaire." As a fitting _finale_ to an inconclusive debate the PRIME MINISTER announced that in order to force a settlement of the coal-strike the railwaymen--Mr. THOMAS, apparently, dissenting--had threatened to join the unemployed.

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Our Erudite Contemporaries.

"Willard was game and well trained, and in stature he was Goliath to
the Daniel of Dempsey."--_Evening Paper._

A DAVID come to judgment!

* * * * *

"The rate plague has developed to an alarming extent in Thanet, and
considerable anxiety is felt, especially as there appears to be no
effective preparation of poison to exterminate them."--_Evening
Paper._

And Thanet is not the only place.

* * * * *

THE TYPE-SLINGER.

BITING and keen as any razor
The fluent pen of LOVAT FRASER;
And swift as arrows, thick as hail,
His outbursts in _The Daily Mail_,
Exposing in impassioned phrase
The PREMIER'S wild and wicked ways.
And yet the PREMIER doesn't squirm,
No, not a bit--the pachyderm!
But goes about with cheerful mien,
As if such things had never been.

So LOVAT FRASER grows emphatic
In efforts to be more dogmatic,
And down the column, once a week,
_His shrill italics fairly shriek._
But does the PREMIER bow his back
And go and give himself the sack?
Not he. Indeed, for all he troubles,
His critic might be blowing bubbles.

It's up to LOVAT FRASER now
To make an even bigger row;
I'd like to see the sturdy fellow
Write articles that simply bellow.
I think the PREMIER might perhaps
Shiver and possibly collapse
IF LOVAT GOT TO WORK IN "CAPS."

* * * * *

The Black Swan of Avon.

"A NATIVE DRAMA Entitled 'Inu vere ki pani'

(Popularly known as Merchant of Venice, but beautified and enlarged
to local taste), Interspersed with Popular Dialogues, latest Songs,
etc. Will (D. V.) be rendered by the ---- Guild."--_West African
Poster._

* * * * *

_Shabbily-dressed person._ "I'VE LOST THE TICKET, BUT I LEFT A HAT. THAT'S IT OVER THERE."

_Attendant._ "I MUST ASK YOU TO FIND THE TICKET, SIR, PLEASE. THE HAT THAT YOU INDICATE IS QUITE NEW."]

* * * * *

THE REVIVAL OF OLLENDORFF.

FROM the memories of my mid-Victorian childhood, before the instruction of a governess had reached a point at which the plunge was made into a preparatory school, three names emerge with remarkable distinctness. "Little Arthur," from whom I derived my earliest knowledge of the History of England; "Henry," by whom I was grounded in the rudiments of the dead Latin tongue (but who must be carefully distinguished from JAMES HENRY, the Virgilian, who in turn had nothing whatever to do with HENRY JAMES the novelist), and OLLENDORFF, the illustrious author of a series of manuals for the teaching of living foreign languages.

OLLENDORFF, I fear, is not even the shadow of a name to the present generation. There is no mention of him in _The Encyclopaedia Britannica_ or in _Chambers_. Even in his own country he seems to have lapsed into obscurity, and in MENDEL'S voluminous _Conversations-Lexikon_ there is only a brief reference to the Ollendorffian method, but no account of the man or his history.

Yet he must have existed; OLLENDORFF cannot have been a mere symbol. And as students of SHAKSPEARE have endeavoured to reconstruct the man from his plays so I feel sure that the character of OLLENDORFF, his interests and politics, might very well be reconstructed from a study of his dialogues. One must admit that his Teutonic patronymic is an obstacle to his revival, but that difficulty can be surmounted by the adoption of an _alias_. For example, by the omission of one of the "f's" and the transposition of one other letter his name, read backwards, becomes Frondello, which is at once euphonious and void of all racial offence.

The Ollendorffian method, it may be noted for the benefit of the ignorant, did not merely depend on the employment of question and answer; it aimed at conveying information drawn from the homely affairs of daily life and the relations between persons belonging to different trades and occupations. "Have you," OLLENDORFF would ask, "the hat of the gardener's son?" And when this had been duly and correctly translated into German or French the pupil proceeded to the answer, "No, but I have the boots of the grocer's brother-in-law."

I think OLLENDORFF built better than he knew; or perhaps he did know. A strong vein of Socialism runs through all his examples, which seem to show a lively appreciation of the Communistic principle. To him there was nothing wrong or dangerous in this mutual interchange and enjoyment of property. He drew no hard-and-fast lines between _meum_ and _tuum_. We cannot help thinking that, at a time when so much depends on the fusion of classes, a new edition of these immortal dialogues, brought up to date so as to meet the exigencies of the new poor, the new rich, the old aristocracy and the new plutocracy, would be fraught with the most salutary results.

The following are some crude suggestions of the lines on which the revision might be carried out:--

"Have you the leathern waistcoat of the taxi-driver?--"No, but I have the reach-me-down trousers of an inferior quality to those worn by the village postman."

"Have you the smooth-running automobile of the prosperous grocer?"--"No, but I have the loan of the push-bicycle of my former under-gardener's uncle."

"Are you going to marry the beautiful daughter of the shoemaker?"--"Yes, and her brother has just become engaged to the widow of my cousin the marquis."

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AT THE PLAY.

"THE ROMANTIC AGE."