Read Ebook: Punch or the London Charivari Volume 159 November 24 1920 by Various Seaman Owen Editor

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DEAR SIR,--When I came to put on the collar that I bought from you yesterday I found that your young man's finger-marks were on it. Why don't you make your assistants wear gloves when they handle collars?

TO A MINISTER OF RELIGION.

NEW RHYMES FOR OLD CHILDREN.

THE ERMINE.

The ermine is not quite as grand as he sounds; As a rule he is shot if he comes in the grounds; You have seen him about by the mulberry-tree, Though I very much doubt if you knew it was he.

He is shot with a gun and hung up by the throat, For the ermine, my son, is the same as the stoat; So when Auntie has got just a little more ermine You can tell her she is covered with vermin.

A. P. H.

ANOTHER IMPENDING APOLOGY.

MORE NOTES FROM A SYNTHETIC COUNTRY DIARY.

As long as the weather remains open I find it a good plan to plant flowers and shrubs which bloom in the spring. Proticipation is a cardinal asset in the outfit of the judicious gardener, and no time should be lost in completing the spring beds, as the cost of hair-mattresses is going up by leaps and bounds.

THE PLAGUE OF DOTS.

From an article on "Back to Germany":--

Nowadays the German Field-Marshal takes his baton into the dining-room to stir his soup.

AT THE PLAY.

"WILL YOU KISS ME?"

Even before the era of Prohibition strange things must have happened in "God's own country" under the banner of the Bird of Freedom. But never so strange as the effects you get on the stage when very English people play at being Americans. You have to be rather young and unsophisticated if such phrases as "He's putting it over on us," or "I'm not going to stand for that," generously peppered about the dialogue and recited in the purest of English accents, can persuade you to believe that you are getting the real local stuff. At the same time you accept cheerfully the most farcical conditions on the vague assumption that all things may be possible over there.

The children's allowances having been cut off on the ground that they did nothing to earn them, she offered her services as his paid secretary. "Propinquity" did its work and she was soon in a position to offer him the privilege of an experimental kiss, thus incidentally justifying the dreadful title of the play.

The first, delivered on the cheek, was a wash-out; but the second, pressed home on the lips, had the desired effect. Then she turned and rent him, telling him exactly what she thought of his treatment of the family. He replied with an eloquent philippic directed at the vices of a bloated aristocracy . Almost before the applause of the gallery had died down, the father burst upon the scene, furious at the report that this hired commercial had been making love to his daughter.

As for the moral, it would seem to be that, if you have no copy of the works of ARISTOTLE in your Fifth Avenue library, and imagine, never having heard of the happy mean, that virtue lies in one of two excesses--an excess of idle luxury or an excess of efficiency--the former is the one to choose.

Still, after all, local colour is no great matter so long as you get some recognisable aspect, though farcically presented, of human nature; but the trouble with this play is that while our sense of the probabilities is never too much outraged so long as the chief character is just a piece of inhuman machinery, the author lapses into the incredible the moment he tries to introduce a little humanity into his scheme. However, I have perhaps taken things too seriously, instead of being properly grateful for some very good entertainment.

O. S.

FASHIONS FOR MEN.

We trust they were edified.

The difficulty with this kind of instrument is to make it shut up.

OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

"It was a happy idea to unveil the portrait in a darkened room."

But after the LEVERHULME-JOHN episode we ought to have been told whose was the happy idea, the artist's or the sitter's?

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