The American barber on board the “Baltic” told me a good story. He was a quaint man, clean shaved and wore black alpaca throughout. Halfway across the Atlantic I was waiting to have my hair cut, when a gentleman bounced in on him, kicking up a devil of a fuss about wanting something at once! The barber, without moving a muscle, calmed him by saying: “Are you leaving to-day, Sir?” But this was his story. He was barber in the train from Chicago to New York that never stops “even for a death” (so he told me) when the train suddenly stopped at a small village and a lady got out. Mr. Thompson, the President of the Railway, was in the train, and asked why? The conductor showed an order signed by a great man of the Railway to stop there. When Mr. Thompson got to New York he asked this great man “What excuse?” and added: “I wouldn’t have done it for my wife!” and the answer he got was: “No more would I!” But the sequel of the story is that I told this tale at an international cosmopolitan lunch party at Lucerne and said: “The curious thing is I knew the man!” when Mr. Chauncey Depew wiped me out by saying that “he knew the woman!” This American Barber quaintly praised the Engine Driver of this Chicago train by telling me that “_he was always looking for what he didn’t want!_” and so had avoided the train going into a River by noticing something wrong with the points! [Illustration: _By kind Permission of “London Opinion.”_ AMERICA AND THE BLOCKADE. “Why Mr. Wilson should expect this country to refrain from exercising a right in return for Germany’s refraining from committing wrongs is not very clear to the ordinary intelligence.”--_Daily Paper_. DAME WILSON (_to P. C. Fisher_):--“Oh, Constable! Don’t hurt him. I’m sure he won’t murder anyone else!”] Admiral Sampson brought his Squadron of the United States Navy to visit me at Bermuda. I was then the Admiral in North America. At the banquet I gave in his honour I proposed his health, and that of the United States. He never said a word. Presently one of his Officers went up and whispered something in his ear. I sent the wine round, and the Admiral then got up, and made the best speech I ever heard. All he said was: “It was a d--d fine old hen that hatched the American Eagle!” His chaplain, after dinner, complimented me on the Officers of my Flagship, the “Renown.” He said: “He had not heard a single ‘swear’ from ‘Soup to Pea-nuts’”! _Lord Fisher on John Bright_ (FROM “BRIGHT’S HOUSE JOURNAL”) At a dinner held in London the other day to Mr. Josephus Daniels, Secretary to the United States Navy, Lord Fisher made the following speech in which he referred to a speech by Mr. John Bright:--