[Illustration: "NOBODY LOOKING!" FRENCH WOLF (_to himself_). "AHA! THE SHEEP-DOGS ARE ASLEEP! I SHALL EAT YOU, MY LITTLE DEAR!" "Our freedom of action is complete. There can be no foreign interference."--_Speech of M. Hanotaux._] * * * * * QUEER QUERIES. THE L. C. C. AGAIN.--Is it possible that the Government is about to back up the London County Council in another attack on one of our time-hallowed institutions? I see that Mr. ASQUITH told a deputation that "one of the first acts of a Local Authority, if it had the power, would be to abolish the Ring." What on earth has a Local Authority to do with the mode in which marriages are celebrated? Englishmen should rise in their thousands to defend the wedding-ring, symbolising as it does the sanctity of the nuptial tie, and should hurl from power a Government which is about to hand us over, fingers and souls, to a tyrannical set of County Council busybodies. Mr. ASQUITH went on to talk rather disconnectedly, it seems to me, about gambling; perhaps he holds the cheap modern view that "Marriage is a Lottery." But I want to know why a Home Secretary meddles with subjects of this sort? And how long is this conspiracy between a Radical Ministry and the L. C. C. to be allowed to continue? NOT TO BE CAUGHT NAPPING. * * * * * MORE SHE-NOTES. (_By_ IOPNA, _Author of "A Yellow Plaster."_) CHAPTER I. "_Virginibus puerisque_," said Miss CONSTANTIA DEMNING; "and it's by a _man_!" "By a _man_!" echoed the awe-struck ATHANASIA. "And to think that in spite of all our pioneering and efforts to confine her studies to the New Woman Series our niece may even now have tasted of the tree and be bursting out into throbbing nerve-centres and palpable possibilities. Compare we two with her! Have you noted her restless craving after Philistine delights such as man-worship and a literary style? Thank Heaven, she never got that from _us_ or _our_ books." The speakers were a pair of old Purgatorial Twins, not without alleviations, designed by Nature to multiply. But aloofness, coupled in harness with anæmia, had nipped the wilding shoots in the bud and won hands down at the distance. True, in the scraggy past, there had been a male creature, less curate than Cupid, that each of them had saved her soul alive in the memory of. But the cares of celibacy, cruel-heavy as a portmanteau-metaphor, now weighed on their shoulders; they could not crush them with a burial-spade like complete natures; they stamped their faces (the cares did the twins' faces) with their ponderous crow's feet. Still, at times, like spring-cleanings, came spring-hankerings. A whiff of yellow tulip on the breeze, and they would drink in the sunlight and the flowers and the beasts and the fishes and the dew and the early worm.