Curse of the race-course and the cinder-path! Roughdom no dirtier, darker danger hath,-- Roughdom, that gulf of guilt with peril rife, That lurks beneath our glittering civic life, Like fires beneath the smiling southern wave, Which, given volcanic vent, make earth a grave And sea a sepulchre. Top bold it grows In the neglect of its appointed foes, The modern Fenris-wolf whose ravening maw Needs muzzling with the Gleipner-chain of Law. EURYTUS at the banquet gorged with glee; "Most savage of the savage Centaurs," he, As OVID sings. PIRITHOUS, lulled to trust, Forgot the secret strength the lurking lust, Until wine-freed and fury-fired they broke, From sleek civility's too slender yoke; Then tables overset, and feast disturbed, Destructiveness unleashed, and wrath uncurbed, "The appearance of a captured city," lent To the late scene of concord and content; Then disappointed craft and thwarted greed, Broke law's frail barriers like a trampled reed, And the tumultuous storm of wild desire, Found vent in rioting force and ravening fire. Is there no moral in the classic tale? Let vigilance but sleep and vigour fail, Authority of prescience be bereft, And, like HIPPODAMIA, Law is left To battling, fierce brute forces, prone to blood, Civilisation's coarser Centaur-brood. Of old the heroes conquered. At the stroke Of angered THESEUS' club of knotted oak, The Centaurs feared and fled toward the sea, Pursued by the triumphant Lapithæ, Law's Lapithæ lay prone in our late fray. Do we not need a THESEUS then to-day? * * * * * NOT A "DEUS EX MACHINÂ." SOME philosophers are very anxious to demonstrate that man is a mere Automaton. A man, however, can at any rate be regulated, and, at need, "run in," which it seems that the Automatic Cigarette and Sweetmeat Machines now so much in vogue cannot. Naughty little boys are convicted of beguiling them of Butter Scotch by means of discs of card and base metal, instead of coins of the realm. On the other hand the Automata are charged with absorbing the coppers of honest would-be purchasers without rendering up the proper portion of Toffee or Tobacco. Machines which are at once dishonest themselves and the cause of dishonesty in others can hardly be looked upon as an improvement upon living vendors, who if they have little conscience to appeal to, have at least persons to be punished. [Illustration: WANTED, A THESEUS; OR, THE BETTING CENTAUR.] * * * * * HYGIENIC.