_Friday._--Just learned that the great gun of Paris, which carries forty-four thousand miles, is to be tried for the first time to-morrow. It would have been used earlier, had it not been necessary to raise a foreign loan to supply funds to load it. Trust it won't be laid in our direction. This war has already caused the Insurance Companies to double their charges! Too bad! _Saturday._--All's well that ends well. Hostilities are at an end. This morning all the glass in the windows were broken at 8 o'clock. Ten minutes later the Champs Elysees was deposited half a mile from Birchington. We now know that the great Paris gun burst on its first discharge, and France exists no longer as a country, but as a "geographical expression" is deposited in various parts of Europe. * * * * * REAL AND IDEAL.--"A Really Hard-Headed Man"--the Iron-skulled individual now exhibiting at the Aquarium. If his will is as iron as his head, what a despot he would be! If France is tired of her Republic, she might try the Iron-Headed Man as a ruler. There is the chance, of course, that he might turn out a numskull, and be only King Log, after all. * * * * * [Illustration: A GENTLEMAN WHO "TAKES LIFE EASILY."] * * * * * [Illustration: A REMINISCENCE OF THE BASEBALL SEASON.] * * * * * JIM'S JOTTINGS. ["Do the poor make the slums, or the slums make the poor?"--_Henry Lazarus, in "Landlordism."_] [Illustration] Is it the poor wot makes the Slums, or the Slums wot makes the poor? Well, that's the question, Guv'nor, and I've 'eared it arsked afore, And the arnser ain't so easy, if you wants to be O.K. Don't suppose as _I_ can settle it, but I'll have my little say. My old friend Mister LAZARUS, now, he ups and sez, sez he, The great Ground Landlord is the great _prime_ cause. "Yah! fiddlededee!" Cries the House-Farmer; "Slums is Slums, acos the Poor is _Pigs_!" "You try 'em, friend philanthropist! They'll play you proper rigs." Yus, there's two sides to heverythink, wus luck! That's where we're fogged. Passiges like foul pigstyes, gents, and backyards like black bogs, Banisters broke for firewood, and smashed winders stuffed with rags, These make the sniffers slate the poor, Perticular if they're wags. Well, gents, you know, it's _this_ way. Just you fancy yerselves _born_ In a back-slum like Ragman's Rents. 'Old 'ard, don't larf with scorn! Some on us _is_ born there, yer know; it might ha' bin _your_ luck, _If_ yer mother'd bin a boozer, and yer father'd got the chuck. Of course _yourn_ was respectable; _mine_ wosn't; there's the diff.! Ah! things like this ain't settled by a snort or by a sniff. Jest fancy hopening yer eyes fust time in a dark dive, Or a sky-parlour where a plarnt o' musk won't keep alive.