No need, old sport, to slay thee now,
    Yet in our hearts the thought we’ll cherish
  That for our sakes, Narcissus, thou,
    So young, so fair, wast like to perish;
  And, as the years of Peace go by
    And war becomes a fireside story,
  “Thank Heaven,” we’ll cry, “thou didst not die,
    But lived to reap the fruits of glory;

  “Assimilating in repose
  Thy fragrant fare of tops and peelings,
  Or making all the garden close
    Echo with-pregustative squealings,
  Or basking, when the sun is high,
    Within thy chamber’s cool recesses
  While some fair child with practised eye
    Combs with a rake thy tangled tresses.”

  And ever, as new twilights burn
    Low, and our offspring, loudly yelling,
  Hurry the well-heaped votive urn
    To thy obscure but ample dwelling,
  “Ready at need thou wast to give
   Thy life,” they’ll say, “that want might miss us,
  For ever, therefore, shalt thou live
    With us and be our love, Narcissus.”

  ALGOL.

* * * * *

[Illustration:  THE SCANDAL.

Tramp (just discharged from workhouse).  “AND TO THINK THAT’S WHAT WE PAYS RATES FOR!”]

* * * * *

ON THE RHINE.

II.

There is an expression here which I expect will shortly become as familiar as “Na poo,” and that is, “Hoot up!” When I first beard our mild and gently-mannered Carfax employ it as a vigorous word of command to a civilian in this small German village, I thought he had gone a little mad.  For no good military purpose, it seemed to me, could possibly be served by demanding an imitation of an owl at eleven o’clock on a wintry morning.  It argued a perverted sense of humour at least; and in truth I had been expecting a slight lapse from the paths of sanity on the part of our Mr. Carfax for some time.  For, you see, he is a pivotal man who cannot get away until others arrive to replace the pivots, and it is difficult to persuade him that all is for the best.  But he informed me that “Hoot up” had nothing whatever to do with, the night-cries of owls or any other kind of bird, but was in fact the idiotic way in which the natives of this country pronounce “Hut ab” (Hat off).

Now you realise what horrid Huns we are.  Civilians are obliged to take off their hats to British officers—­a very grim business.  In reality, except that we are the hated English, it makes very little difference to the Bosch, for the innkeeper here says that orders concerning the taking off of hats to all and sundry became so stringent in 1918 that the local postman was constantly interrupted in his duties to answer the salutes of people who wished to be on the safe side.

Bosches who have really fought for their country do not object to “Hoot-upping.”  They of course are the first to realise that inhabitants of occupied countries were forced by them to “hoot up,” and that therefore there is a certain justice now in the retaliation.  Anyway, from these people the procedure does not greatly interest us; but the overdressed Bosch profiteer, fat and muttony—­to hoot him up in his own village!  Really, you know, in some ways the War has been worth while.