the Second Act were not, I suspect, any elaborate (and quite irrelevant) joke of the actor-author’s at the expense of the transpontine method, but just queer puppets brought on to disentangle the complications, though I confess I half thought that the villain, Mr. LAWRENCE LEYTON, was pulling our legs with a quite deliberate burlesque.  On the whole I am afraid this play is but another wreck on that old snag of the dramatised novel.

But there were plenty of isolated good things, such as Mr. O.B.  CLARENCE’S really excellent Mayor, puzzled, pompous, eagle-pecked.  Miss FLORENCE IVOR, the eagle in question, gave a shrewd and shrewish portrait of a wife gey ill to live with.  Mr. REGINALD BACH’S very entertaining imaginary portrait of a faithful boy scout was a stroke of genius, his “call of the wild” being by far the best whim of the evening.  Miss EVA LEONARD-BOYNE as Ninetta, the orphan, did her little job tenderly and prettily, but I couldn’t believe in Ninetta in that galley, and I doubt if she did.  Mr. GORDON ASH was the debonair hero.  I do most solemnly entreat him to consider the example of some of the elders in his profession who have adopted a laugh as their principal bit of business.  It may turn into a millstone.  Was he not laughing the same laugh on this very stage in a very different part three days ago?  He was.  If he got a month, laugh-barred, he would profit by the sentence.  For he has jolly good stuff in him.

T.

[Illustration:  BORROWED PLUMES IN A MAYOR’S NEST.

Alderman Twentyman .  Mr. O.B.  CLARENCE.

Felix Delany . . . .  Mr. GORDON ASH.]

* * * * *

MORE COMMANDEERING.

From a report of the PRIME MINISTER’S speech at Carnarvon:—­

    “There are eight million houses in this country.  Let us have
    VICTORY GUM FACTORY, Nelson, Lancs.”—­Daily Dispatch.

But surely he does not want to be known as “The Stickit Minister.”

* * * * *

    “A grocer in a London suburb complains that on Saturday he and his
    staff were ’run o ffthei rlegs by the extraordinary demands of
    customers.’”—­Westminster Gazette.

We congratulate the printer on his gallant effort to depict the situation.

* * * * *

    “Wanted, Cook Generals, House Parlourmaids; fiends might
    suit.”—­Irish Paper.

Discussion of the eternal servant problem is apt to be one-sided; it was quite time that we heard from the advocatus diaboli.

* * * * *

TO STEPHEN LEACOCK

    (Professor of Political Economy at McGill University, Montreal,
    and author of “Further Foolishness” and other notable works of
    humour).