Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 25, 1914 — John Shaqi
Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 25, 1914Various
General
Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 25, 1914
Various
English wit and humor -- Periodicals
The eddies have an air too, and brave it is and blithe;
I think I may have heard it that day at Bablockhythe;
And where the Eynsham weir-fall breaks out in rainbow spray
The Evenlode comes singing to join the pretty play.
But where I heard that music I cannot rightly tell;
I only know I heard it, and that I know full well:
I heard a little water, and, oh, the sky was blue,
A little water singing as little waters do.
R. C. L.
* * * * *
AN APOLOGY THAT MADE THINGS WORSE.
We had a fancy-dress ball on December 30th. They have these things in
nearly all Swiss Hotels and you have to put up with them. As a matter of
fact Matilda and I enjoyed ourselves. We supped well and danced quite
often. At 3.30 A.M. we set out for our rooms. We took a lighted candle with
us to keep us warm as we went. The way to get the most warmth from a candle
is to sit round it. As the corridor was cold, we sat round the candle
outside Miss Wortley's room, but this was quite accidental.
We didn't know that she had gone to bed at 10.30 P.M. with the primary
object of sleeping and the ulterior motive of getting up the next morning
in time to catch an early train. We weren't to know that she had wasted her
time from 11 P.M. to 3.25 A.M. listening to a procession of revellers
retiring to their rooms. We had no suspicion that she was just dozing off
for the first time when we stopped to warm ourselves. We really made very
little noise, though we may have laughed just a little. The report which
has got about, that I tried to climb up the wall to see the time, is
inaccurate. The clock is not nearly high enough up the wall to render this
necessary, and I didn't care a button what the time was.
If we had known that the Germans who ought to have been asleep in the room
opposite to Miss Wortley would come out into the corridor and shout in
their nasty guttural language, we should probably not have tried to find
out whether anything was attached to the other end of a piece of tape that
protruded from under their door. It was quite a long piece of tape, and
there was something attached to the end of it, though we never found out
what that something was. Anyway, it was too large to pass under the door,
though we pulled the tape quite hard. We had just given up our
investigation and reached our respective rooms when the German family
arrived in the corridor and commented on the matter.
I can't see that we were really to blame because Miss Wortley suffered from
insomnia, missed her early train next morning and had to pay an extra half
franc for having breakfast in her bedroom. She was very unpleasant about it
and went round telling everybody that we had kept her awake all night. She
was one of those women who----But there, I don't want to be nasty, and
anyone who reads this will guess the kind of woman she was.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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