Why is it that publishers, aye, and even booksellers, are so often out of sympathy with the poets? I spoke once to a bookseller in Nairn about a local poet's volume that was lying on the counter. "Do you personally know this bard?" I asked. "Ay, that I do," was the reply; "he's an eccentric wee chap. I've many a laugh at him as he goes along the street, muttering to himself and picking his teeth with a fountain-pen. Eccentric! bless my soul, how could a poet be anything but eccentric? Besides, he's bound to be a liar: for if he can't get the end of a line to come right with truth for a rhyme, he has got to make it _clink with a whopper_. Why, man, it's a great worry for an honest man like me to speak the truth in plain prose. If I were to send out my bills in metre to my customers, there would be a rise of temperature soon in the town of Nairn. No, no: the only thing that can be done with a poet's manuscript is to take it to the head of the garden, sprinkle it with paraffin, and apply a vesta." "A GRAND DAY FOR IT." While one of the great six-day battles of the Eastern war was going on, a country doctor, by some mistake in delivery, did not get his _Herald_ to breakfast one morning. Anxious to get the news, he bolted his meal and sallied forth to hear the latest from the seat of war. He saw a wrinkled old churl trimming the roadside hedge with a bill-hook, and humming a tune like the gravedigger in _Hamlet_, Act v. "Any news of the war?" gasped the doctor. "Eh?" said the old man, without discontinuing his work. "Are you not aware," said the doctor, "that there is a great battle raging in Manchuria?" "No," said the man, "I know nothing about it, and care less." "What!" shouted the doctor. "You care nothing about it? Why, man, the Russians and Japanese are at this moment _fighting for the hegemony of all Eastern Asia_." "Lord, do you say so?" replied the old cock, lopping unconcernedly at his hedge; "well, all I can say is, that _they're gettin' a grand day for it_." A PRO-BOER.