There used to be fairies in Germany-- The children will look for them still; They will search all about till the sunlight slips out And the trees stand frowning and chill. "The flowers," they will say, "have all vanished, And where can the fairies be fled That played in the fern?"--The flowers will return, But I fear that the fairies are dead. * * * * * The Kaiser Lands in England. "A disturbance of rates (when it tends to raise them) is never popular. Father Barry remarked yesterday that Mr. Underhill, as chairman of the Assessment Committee, was the most unpopular man in Plymouth except one, and the other one was the Kaiser."--_Western Daily Mercury_. * * * * * Letter addressed to local Tribunal:-- "Dear Sirs,--The reason for my exemption has been removed and I shall be glad to join your army if there is still a vacancy." * * * * * [Illustration] Lady (to doctor, who has volunteered to treat her pet). "AND IF YOU FIND YOU CAN'T CURE HIM, DOCTOR, WILL YOU PLEASE PUT HIM OUT OF PAIN?--AND OF COURSE YOU MUST CHARGE ME JUST AS FOR AN ORDINARY PATIENT." * * * * * OUR BOOKING-OFFICE. (_By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks_.) I should like to commend with extraordinarily little reserve Mr. FIELDING-HALL'S _The Way of Peace_ (HURST AND BLACKETT) to the kind of reader that is drawing plans in his head for a New England. No wonder that in these great days the impatient idealist rushes forth with his bag of dreams. The author of _The Soul of a People_ is extreme but sane--an extremist in common sense, say. He stakes on the fact of human solidarity as the cure for the bitternesses and crookednesses of politics; declares life and men to be good, not evil (how right he is!); wants an England rescued from the Puritans on the one hand and the mere musical comedians on the other; an England chaste because freer, less ignorant; good beer in easeful inns; the village or township as the unit of government and of fellowship; a return to music and the dance, not as a plasmon-fed high-brow proposition but as the natural expression of a joy of life returned; a clear fount of honour; a representative House of Commons; justice, respect, common sense and responsibility instead of charity; some place other than the streets for our young men and maidens to make love in; a recognition of crime as mainly a social, not an individual, disease; a law simplified and scales of justice not weighted against the poor; and a host of other good and wise and nearly possible things. Here is not the barren politics of manipulation but an ideal of living citizenship. I commend it to all believers in new days and all honourable disgruntlers; not perhaps as a programme but as a tonic. * * * * *