Here, impressed with the reflections awakened by this melancholy fact, he writes a letter to the _Times_--a letter which happens to be just the proper quantity of “stuff” to fill up the end of a column: so it goes in. No one pays any attention to it. Snooks shows it to his friends at the club--they smile, half read it, don’t understand it and don’t want to understand it. After some difficulty he gets an old deaf gentleman to look at it. “What’s this, what’s this!” says the old deaf gentleman nervously--“Something happened to our Allies!” “No, no!” roars Snooks--“It’s a letter!--a letter I’ve written; I, myself--to the _Times_ about Kitchener!” “Ah, I wouldn’t do it if I were you!” mildly replies the old gentleman, with one hand up to his ear--“We don’t know anything about his work----” “_I_ know!” shouts Snooks--“If he had taken _my_ advice----” “Ah, ah! Did you know him?” inquires the old gentleman, evidently surprised and unconvinced. “_Know_ him!” Snooks snorts defiance, as much as to imply that if he knows the inside of his own pocket he knew Kitchener still better! In irritable impatience he watches the old gentleman’s leisurely perusal of his epistolary effusion. “Ah! Yes--er--yes! I don’t agree with you,” says the old gentleman at last, putting aside the paper. “I’m not quite sure that I understand it, but it’s not the way I’d put it.” “Oh, all right!” and Snooks turns on his heel with a superior air of disdain. “I suppose you’re for the wasting of millions! Everybody is, that doesn’t study the subject. Now _I_----” Here a stray man comes to the rescue of the deaf old gentleman, the conversation changes, and the famous _Times_ letter is forgotten. Often Snooks seems to be ubiquitous. His letters appear in numerous papers, especially the provincial ones. Sometimes a Snooks’s “opinion” is squeezed just under the “Space for Special News,” which in many halfpenny rags is not “Special News” at all, but merely the results of--Football!