No more for the present from

Your affectionate

LOUISA.

* * * * *

[Illustration:  “NOW, BOBBY, BE A GOOD BOY AND COME AND SAY YOUR PRAYERS.”

“I DON’T WANT TO.”

“BUT YOU MUST, BOBBY.  COME ALONG AT ONCE.”

“ALL RIGHT, THEN.  I SHALL PRAY FOR THE GERMANS.”]

* * * * *

SONGS OF FOOD PRODUCTION.

III.

  Tub-swill, tub-swill! have you any tub-swill? 
    I will send my footman to fetch it, if I may;
  For I’m hoping all the restaurants and all the nicest clubs will
    Give me broken victuals, if I send for them each day;
        In the Park, in Piccadilly,
          Down at Ascot, in the Shires,
        We’ve been up in terms like “filly,”
          “Dams” and “sires,”
          “Smooths” and “wires;”
        Now it’s “gilts” and it’s “boars”
        And it’s “suckers” and it’s “stores”—­
          The terms that one acquires
        Now we’re keeping pigs to pay.

  Hog-wash, hog-wash! are you selling hog-wash
    In a pretty bottle with a nice pneumatic spray? 
  Nevermore in perfume shall a useless little dog wash;
    In my heart and boudoir precious piggy’s holding sway. 
        Oh, indeed, it’s worse than silly
          If a person now admires
        An inedible young filly,
          Dams and sires,
          Smooths and wires;
        For in gilts and in boars
        And in suckers and in stores
          Proper keenness one acquires
        Now we’re keeping pigs to pay.

* * * * *

    “A Berlin telegram says that the Kaiser has created the Austrian
    Emperor a Field-Marshal.

    The material damage done was insignificant.”—­Glasgow Evening Times.

But the moral effect was tremendous.

* * * * *

    “More Food.—­Wanted, Partner, either sex, to increase stock open-air
    pig-farm.”—­Morning Paper.

An opening for one of the Food Hogs we read so much about.

* * * * *

OXFORD REVISITED.

  Last week, a prey to military duty,
    I turned my lagging footsteps to the West;
  I have a natural taste for scenic beauty,
    And all my pent emotions may be guessed
      To find myself again
    At Didcot, loathliest junction of the plain.

  But all things come unto the patient waiter,
    “Behold!” I cried, “in yon contiguous blue
  Beetle the antique spires of Alma Mater
    Almost exactly as they used to do
      In 1898,
    When I became an undergraduate.

  “O joys whereto I went as to a bridal,
    With Youth’s fair aureole clustering on a brow
  That no amount of culture (herpecidal)
    Will coax the semblance of a crop from now,
      Once more I make ye mine;
    There is a train that leaves at half-past nine.