Thursday, July 19th.—The only thing that keeps Mr. Reddy at Westminster is his delight in acting as Chorus to Major Pretyman Newman. Whenever the hon. and gallant Member asks a question Mr. Reddy, in a piping voice of remarkable carrying power, immediately puts another, designed to throw doubt upon his personal prowess or his military capacity. Major Newman had several Questions on the Paper this afternoon, and, as he had just announced the withdrawal of his valuable support from a Government so lost to all sense of propriety as to welcome Messrs. Churchill and Montagu to its fold, Mr. Reddy’s comments were awaited with pleasurable anticipation.
Alas! for once he was not in his place. Even when Major Newman elicited the damning information that some members of the Dublin Metropolitan Police occasionally employ a German barber there was no penetrating voice from the back benches to ask, “Why doesn’t the honourable Mimber go and shave them himself?”
Mr. Jowett wants the Home Secretary to withdraw the permission he gave some time ago “to employ women on the night-turn in wool-combing.” Several much-married Members are afraid that whatever he may decide the objectionable practice will continue.
* * * * *
SCOTLAND FOR EVER.
They came from untamable highlands,
From glens where their fathers
were free,
From misty and mountainous islands
Set fast in the throat of
the sea;
They fought for the honour of Britain;
They died in defence of the
right;
Their deeds are in history written
In letters of
light.
They fell where the Ganges is flowing;
They lie ’neath the
Russian Redan;
Their dust o’er the desert is blowing
In the whirlwinds of far Kordofan;
The sons of Glen Orchy and Rannoch
Sleep sound by the slow-moving
Scheldt,
And the bones of the men of Loch Fannich
Are white on the
veldt.
But the Lows and Lochmaben and Gairloch
Still march to the battle
array,
And the fighters from many a fair loch,
Like their fathers, leap forth
to the fray;
Red flame tears the darkness asunder
Where the curtain of battle
is drawn,
Where the clansmen through death-cloud
and thunder
Go over at dawn.
In the strength of the hills and the heather,
With the salt of the sea in
their blood,
They sweep from the trenches together
With the force of an onrushing
flood;
Like the billows that beat upon Moidart
When gales from the Hobrides
blow,
Like a storm on the mountains of Knoidart
They burst on
the foe.
* * * * *
[Illustration: Hairdresser (with a view to business—to customer, who is getting rapidly bald). “There are plenty of hairdressers, you know, Sir, who profess to make a wig; but, when you’ve got it on, it looks nothing like a wig at all, Sir.”]


