I have often wondered why this malignity? Why, too, on the part of the “Acting Clerk,” whom I have always beheld with respectful admiration in his curly white wig marching in the Shakespeare Sunday or Mayoral processions to Church? He is my beau-ideal of a cultured Dogberry--his very look and movement express--“I am a wise fellow; and which is more an officer; and which is more a householder; and which is more as pretty a piece of flesh as any in Messina (Stratford) and one that knows the law, go to; and a rich fellow enough, go to; and a fellow that hath had losses; and one that hath two gowns and everything handsome about him! O that I had been writ down----” No--I will not finish the quotation; suffice it to say that I have never intentionally or to my knowledge caused offence to this excellent man. But both Church and State were in the persecution of my quite innocent personality; two dismissed outdoor employés of my own first started the mischief, and as one had found a temporary job on the local “food control,” it was easy to trace the work of hands guided by personal spite and desire to give me trouble. Afraid to start the accusation in Stratford itself, they quite ingenuously managed to transfer it through a mutual friend to London, from whence the “summons” was “arranged” to come--and since then, having found out the whole petty plot, I have been full of amused compassion for the miserable plotters. They must surely feel that the game was hardly worth the candle! Of course, press-reporters rushed down like hounds in full cry directly they scented possible injury to me--they would never have troubled themselves to note anything I did of good--but anything that savoured of meanness and disloyalty on my part was “nuts” to them! As they never saw me, and I made no appearance in court, these poor untidy pressmen were reduced to their usual fictions, and wired all over the world that I had “made a scene in court,” “attacked Lloyd George,” etc., etc.! (And yet, just before this comedy started, and â propos of sugar, I had sent Miss Megan Lloyd George some chocolate “eclairs” made at home, with which this charming little friend of mine was much delighted!) Yes--these chivalrous press-men labelled me from England to furthest Ind as a hoarder and hypocrite and I was left without remedy. I was assailed by the lowest anonymous letters and post cards; of course one knows how to take such off-scourings of depraved human minds, as no one but a villain, male or female, would write an anonymous letter. But with all the pain I felt at the misjudgment, amounting almost to cruelty, of the press, which deliberately did its best to injure me with my reading public, I had my compensations. I had hundreds of letters from our men at the front indignantly protesting against the wrong done to me--and a wonderful document signed by the officers and men of the Overseas Military Forces of Canada came to hearten me up by its generous testimony as follows:--