* * * * *

[Illustration:  Politically inclined Nurse (exhibiting new daughter to M.P.).  “LET US ’OPE, SIR, THAT SHE MAY LIVE TO BE CALLED THE MOTHER OF THE ’OUSE OF COMMONS.”]

* * * * *

COMMERCIAL CANDOUR.

    “120 Pairs Unbleached Calico Sheets, 2 x 23/4 yards.  Sale price,
    12/11 per pair; present value, 1/- per pair.”—­Yorkshire
    Paper.

* * * * *

    “Including new enlistments there are about 1,000 men
    concentrated in and around Berlin.”—­Manchester Guardian.

Let FOCH be warned.

* * * * *

    “BAD BOYS AND THE BIRCH.

    “We are glad to observe that the Recorder has decided to adopt
    stern measures with juvenile offenders who are brought before
    him in future.”—­Irish Times.

“Stern measures” is good.

* * * * *

    “NON-STOP WAIST DRIVES, Every Wednesday Evening at 8.30.  L10
    Top, and Six other Special Prizes.”—­Local Paper.

Believed to be under the patronage of the FOOD-CONTROLLER.

* * * * *

THE FOOD PROBLEM IN PARIS.

The cost of living in the vicinity of the Peace Conference has been enormously exaggerated.  Likewise the difficulty of reorganizing Europe on a truly ethnic basis.  By combining the two questions I have found them immensely simplified, and I have been in Paris only three days.

My meaning will be clearly illustrated by the record of a single day’s experience—­with the representative of the Dodopeloponnesians for dejeuner and the delegate of the Pan-Deuteronomaniads for dinner.

I made the acquaintance of the first in the lift.  On the way down it came out that I was journaliste assisting at the Conference of the Peace, whereupon the other introduced himself as secretary of the Dodopeloponnesian delegation and eager for the pleasure of entertaining me at dejeuner.

Nothing international arose in connection with the hors d’oeuvres.  It was between the soup and the fish that my host inquired whether I had yet found time to look into the just claim of the Dodopeloponnesian people to the neighbouring island of Funicula.

“You mean,” I said, “on the ground that the island of Funicula was brought under the Dodopeloponnesian sceptre on September 11th, 1405, by Blagoslav the Splay-fingered, from whom it was wrested on February 3rd, 1406, by the Seljuks?”

“Precisely,” he said.  “But also because the people of Funicula are originally of Dodopeloponnesian stock.”

“Yet they speak the language of Pan-Deuteronomania,” I said.

“A debased dialect,” he said, “foisted upon them by a remission of ten per cent. in taxes for every hundred words of the lingo learned by heart, with double votes for irregular verbs.”