The P-t L-r-te.—­The Order of “The Foresters.”

The Oxf-rd E-ght.—­The Blue Riband of the Thames.

S-r A-g-st-s Dr-r-l-n-s.—­A month’s well-deserved rest.

N-b-dy in P-rt-c-l-r.—­A legacy of L100,000.

Ev-ryb-dy in G-n-r-l.—­Rates and taxes.

* * * * *

[Illustration:  SO FRIVOLOUS!

Wife.  “SOLOMON, I HAVE A BONE TO PICK WITH YOU.”

Solomon (flippantly).  “WITH PLEASURE, MY DEAR, SO LONG AS IT’S A FUNNY BONE!”]

* * * * *

THE DYNAMITE DRAGON.

  A dragon!  Faugh! that foul and writhing Worm
  Seems scarcely worthy of the ancient term
  That fills old myth, and typifies the fight
  ’Twixt wrathful evil and the force of right. 
  The dragons of the prime, fierce saurian things
  With ogre gorges and with harpy wings,
  Fitted their hour; the haunts that gave them birth,
  The semi-chaos of the early earth,
  The slime, the earthquake shock, the whelming flood,
  Made battle ground for the colossal brood. 
  But now, when centuries of love and light
  Have warmed and brightened man’s old home; when might
  Is not all sinister, nor all desire
  Fierce appetite, that all-devouring fire,—­
  When life is not alone a wasting scourge,
  But from the swamps of soulless strife emerge
  Some Pisgah peaks of promise where the dove
  Finds footing, high the whirling gulfs above,—­
  Now the intrusion of this loathly shape,
  With pestilence-breathing jaws that blackly gape
  For indiscriminate prey, is sure a thing
  To set celestial guards once more a-wing;
  To fire a new St. Michael or St. George
  With the bright death to cleave the monster’s gorge,
  And trample out the Laidly Worm’s last breath
  In the convulsions of reluctant death. 
  A crawling, craven, sneaking, snaking brute;
  Purposeless spite, and hatred absolute,
  In hideous shape incarnate!  Venomed Gad
  In Civilisation’s path; malignant-mad,
  And blindly biting; raising an asp-neck
  In Beauty’s foot-tracks, and prepared to wreck
  The ordered work of ages in a day,
  To raze and shatter, to abase and slay. 
  Blind as the earthquake, headlong as the storm,
  Yet in such hideous subter-human form,
  Vulgar as venomous!  Dragon indeed,
  And dangerous, but with no soul save greed,
  No aim save chaos.  Bloody, yet so blind,
  The common enemy of humankind;
  Whose age-stored works and ways it yearns to blast,
  To smite to ruined fragments, and to cast
  Prone—­as itself is prone—­in common dust. 
  The Beautiful, the Wise, the Strong, the Just,
  All fruit of labour, and all spoil of thought,
  All that co-operant Man hath won or wrought,
  All that the heart has loved, the mind has taught