By many a shell-torn desolate chateau
    Stand monumental piles of martial store
  Reared up long since to stem a savage foe
    By labours of the Army Service Corps;

  And day by day, in spite of our advice,
    They linger wastefully to rust and rot;
  We ask (and let your answer be concise): 
    Have all the dumps been sold, or have they not?

  No more may KELLAWAY in bland retort
    Disguise the truth with verbal circumstance;
  Our special correspondents still report: 
    “Entrenching tools obscure the face of France.”.

  The case is plain; the issue is distinct;
    You either answer now or out you trot
  (And kindly make that answer quite succinct): 
    Have all the dumps been sold, or have they not?

* * * * *

    “WEDDING ROMANCE.

    “The acquaintanceship soon developed into a house where Miss
    ——­ was living.”—­Daily Paper.

The chief obstacle to matrimony being thus removed, there could, of course, be only one end to the story.

* * * * *

“The Committee has decided to call the contest the ’Golden Apple Challenge,’ having in mind the legend of Paris giving a golden apple to Helen of Troy as the fairest of the three beautiful women who came to ask his judgment.”—­Daily Mail.

Personally we never attach much importance to these Paris legends.

* * * * *

[Illustration:  MORE ADVENTURES OF A POST-WAR SPORTSMAN.

Master.  “HI!  YOU!  ’WARE BEANS.  DON’T YOU KNOW BEANS WHEN YOU SEE ’EM?”

P.-W.S. “THEY’RE THE LITTLE THINGS THEY PUTS IN TINS WITH PORK, AIN’T THEY?”]

* * * * *

OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

(By Mr. Punch’s Staff of Learned Clerks.)

During the past few years the plays and stories, especially the stories, of ANTON TCHEHOV have so triumphantly captured English-speaking readers that there must be many who will welcome with eagerness the volume of his Letters (CHATTO AND WINDUS).  This happy chance we owe, of course, directly to Mrs. CONSTANCE GARNETT, who here proves once again that in her hands translation ranks as a fine art.  Both the Letters and the Biographical Sketch that precedes them are of extraordinary charm and interest.  Because TCHEHOV’S stories are so conspicuously uncoloured by the personality of their writer (his method being, as it were, to lead the reader to a window of absolute transparency and bid him look for himself), it comes almost as a shock to find how vivid and many-hued that personality in fact was.  Nor is it less astonishing to observe a nature so alive with sympathy expressing itself in an art so detached.  More than once his letters to literary friends are concerned with a defence of