* * * * * [Illustration: Epilogue] MR. PUNCH IN RUSSIA. In the last Epilogue, where Mr. Punch was described as paying a call upon our brave soldiers in a German prison-camp, I confessed that I didn't understand how he got there in the body. To-day I have to report a far simpler enterprise. This time he has merely been on a mission to Russia. Anybody can do that, unless the Sailors' and Firemen's Union mistake him for Mr. RAMSAY MACDONALD and no one has yet made this error in respect of Mr. Punch. His brilliant mastery of the Russian language is a harder thing to believe; but, as nothing is said of an interpreter, I must suppose that he had been quietly and painfully taking lessons in this very difficult tongue. Anyhow, you must picture him, at some spot not specified, addressing a concourse of enthusiastic Revolutionaries. I propose to give a brief summary of his speech, from which you will gather that he spoke to them like a father, and that, while he showed a cordial sympathy with the cause of Russian freedom, he did not hesitate to deliver himself of some very straight home-truths. "Friends, Russians, Allies," he began; "I come on behalf of my fellow-countrymen" (you know his touching way of regarding himself as the medium of the best intelligence to be found in the British Empire) "to convey their affectionate sympathy with you in your triumph over the tyranny of Tsardom. At first we took the natural and hopeful view that your Revolution, supported by all that was noblest in all ranks of your society, was the result of bitter dissatisfaction with the conduct of the War, and with the secret and sinister enemy influences which were at work to ruin your chances in the common fight against Kaiserism. "Yet it was immediately followed by wholesale desertions from the firing-line and a general disintegration of military discipline. It seems, then, that we were wrong; for otherwise it would be a curious irony that a movement designed for the better conduct of the War should produce a complete stagnation on your fighting fronts; or, to look at it from another point of view, that a Revolution which owed its success to the War, since, in such a war as this, the Army and the nation are one, should have, for its immediate consequence, an apparent failure on your part to remember the purpose for which the War is being fought. "No doubt many motives were at work, and it was perhaps natural that in the joy of your new-found freedom you should be tempted to forget the conditions that had made it possible, and to regard the War as something outside and remote, and its importance as small compared with the achievement of internal liberty.