And long as I listened beside the stile The larches echoed that eerie sound, Steady and tireless, mile on mile, The hunting cry of a single hound. W.H.O. * * * * * "FAMILIES SUPPLIED." "Village General Stores Wanted for dis. soldier: also widow and daughter; price no object if genuine."--_Daily Paper._ * * * * * "H.B. Playford is 6 feet 5 inches, or thereabouts, in height, has a fabulous reach, and weighs 13-1/2 stone. He rowed No. 8 in the Jesus four, beaten by Leander at Henley."--_Times._ A fabulous reach indeed! So fabulous that it made the four look as long as an eight. * * * * * THE AMALGAMATED SOCIETY OF PASSENGERS. "I've hit on something at last," cried Charles exultantly, throwing himself down on my second-best armchair. "I wish you wouldn't hit on it so hard," I complained; "the springs are half-broken already. What's the trouble?" "Have you ever heard," he inquired, "of the black-coated salariat?" "The egg of the greater green-backed woodpecker--" "It isn't a bird," he said; "it's a class of people that works with its brains. And the hand of Labour, according to my evening paper, is being held out to it." "But suppose one wears a pepper-and-salt suit," I said, "and writes 'Society Gossip.' What about that?" "That's just my point. All these accepted lines of distinction are absolutely wrong. It isn't what people work at that divides them, it's the way they travel to their work. Sir THOMAS MALORY knew that. When _Lancelot_ was going to rescue _Guinevere_ he had his white horse badly punctured by a bushment of archers and had to finish the journey in a woodcutter's cart. And that was a great disgrace to him and made the _Queen's_ ladies laugh. It would be just the same with the typists of a rich employer if his motor-car broke down and he had to arrive in a bus. How do you get to town in the morning yourself?" "I am a Tuber," I said sadly. "Every bright morning I say I will go by bus, but when I reach the Tube station the draught sucks me in through the door, the man grabs me by the collar, throws me into the sink, lifts up the plug and down we go into the drain-pipe together. I think I have the brand of Tubal Cain on my brow. It is a kind of perpetual crease--" "I too Tube," said Charles; "but I know many eminently respectable bus people as well. Especially bus-women. They ride about, they tell me, on the most fantastically labelled vehicles and are always seeing new suburbs swim into their ken, and gazing-- 'Out over London with a wild surmise, Silent upon a seat of No. 10,' or whatever the bally thing may be. But I never join their rash adventures. I belong to a different _milieu_. I move in a sort of social underworld. Not that I can deny, of course, that there is a certain amount of overlapping."