Some excitement was created in a Piccadilly grill at luncheon time when a private English “Tommy” walked in and sat down at a table with a young lieutenant. The private is the young officer’s father, and before the war held a high position in a London bank. His lunching with the officer caused some discussion, and some said it was too much democracy even for the English army. After the meal the young officer said: “Should you refuse to let the governor buy you a lunch merely because he is a Tommy?” Skipper of Six-master at Twenty-one. Shortly after the _E. R. Sterling_, the only six-masted barkentine in the world, arrived in San Francisco, Cal., from Nanaimo, B. C., laden with coal, she was boarded by Federal operatives, who made a thorough search of the hold for a high-power wireless apparatus which officials have been informed is destined to be transferred at sea to a foreign warship from some American vessel in the near future. No apparatus was found. Captain Edward Sterling, junior, son of the owner of the _E. R. Sterling_, is only twenty-one years old, and is said to be the youngest skipper of a deep-water ship to possess a master’s license. The vessel requires a crew of only twelve men, as her sails are raised by donkey engines. Canary Sings in Trenches. A private of the English Second Rifle Brigade, writing to a friend at Sheffield, England, tells this story of a canary which he says sings and cheers his comrades through the smoke of battle: “Our only companion--in the trenches--is a little canary we rescued from a deserted house, which had been almost shelled to atoms. On the cage was a ticket: ‘Please look after this little bird.’ It has made itself quite at home with us. When we leave the trenches, we hand it over to the next regiment. So you may guess it’s made quite a fuss of. Last time we went into the trenches our canary was almost black through the smoke from shell fire, but it seems as cheerful as ever. Really, it gets so black with smoke that it’s a job to distinguish it from a sparrow.” Dickens is German Soldiers’ Favorite. Dickens is the German soldiers’ favorite novelist. He stands first in a list of fifty authors prepared by the great publishing house of Reclam, of Leipzig, famous for its cheap reprints. Of the total number of orders from the German troops at the front forty-eight per cent calls for fiction, nineteen per cent for serious reading, comprising philosophy, religion, and arts; seventeen per cent for poetry and drama, and sixteen per cent for light miscellaneous stuff, including humorous works. The German soldier is catholic in his taste when it comes to fiction, for not only does he top his list with Dickens, but includes twenty-one other foreign novelists, among whom appear Bulwer, Defoe, Scott, Dumas, Daudet, Merimée, Prevost, and Victor Hugo. Forests Fired by Sparks.