It is well for an English soldier to be equal to a sea-voyage; but it is not generally known that it is requisite he should be familiar with life on the ocean wave. Such is the case, however, or a journalist protesting against the Duke of Connaught’s promotion to a major-generalship, on the ground that ‘he never went to sea unless it was absolutely necessary,’ is as much out of his reckoning as the correspondent representing M. Paul Bert as telling the people of Grenoble: ‘We have enemies whom their triumph has not satiated. Their appetites command us to be watchful; and once our military education is made, and our army thoroughly organised, we shall be able to say to our foes: “Take care! _twelve hundred_ citizens are arrayed in arms before you. They are all ready; they are all united. Do not touch France!”’ The London shopkeeper’s ‘Boots sold and healed while you wait,’ is not so likely to attract customers as the more pronounced orthographical eccentricities of the Gloucestershire gardener, having ‘sallery plants for zale,’ and ready to supply all comers with kalleflour, brokaler, weentur greens, raggit jak, rottigurs cale, and sprouiting brokla. But it would be hard to resist the temptation of assisting at a dramatic entertainment lightened by the musical performances of ‘a band of amateur gentlemen;’ and still harder to refuse to take a ticket for a cricket-match, knowing ‘the entire proceeds are for the benefit of the late Isaac Johnson, who is totally unprovided for;’ but the loyal natives of the Principality were not to be persuaded into joining a proposed Welsh Land League by the suggestion that they might ‘send in their names anonymously.’ When the inhabitants of a French town complained of being disturbed by the explosion of shells, the discharge of cannon, and the rattle of small-arms at a mimic presentment of the bombardment of Plevna, the authorities sent a written notice to those concerned, informing them that for the future, Plevna must be bombarded at the point of the bayonet. The guardians of public property at Concord, Massachusetts, posted up placards offering a reward for the apprehension and conviction of persons guilty of ‘girdling’ the trees in the school-house yard, and promising the payment of a suitable reward ‘for anything of the kind that may hereafter be done to any of the trees in the streets.’ Of course, they no more meant what they said, than did the Commissioners of National Education in Ireland, when, in a Report, signed by four professors, they stated that the female teachers ‘were instructed in plain cooking, had, in fact, to go through the process of cooking themselves in their turn;’ a specimen of official English upon a par with the inscription telling visitors to Kew: ‘This Gallery, containing studies from Nature, painted by her in various lands, was given in 1882 to these Gardens by Marianne Hope.’