Government unemployees at present engaged in drawing their weekly donation are requested to call at the Labour Exchange every day at 10 A.M. Morning dress. It is not permissible for applicants to send their wives, valets or chauffeurs to represent them. Smoking is not prohibited, but applicants are requested not to offer tobacco, cigarettes or cigars to the officials. Arrangements are to be made to provide entertainment by means of concert parties and motor-trips; also newspapers and periodicals, in which, to avoid annoyance, the "Situations Vacant" column has been blacked out. It is desirable that applicants should not wear fur coats. The present fashion does not go beyond a grey tweed lounge suit, with white spats and velours hat. A limited number of openings are offered to any who care to act as batmen to unemployed munition-workers. A doctor is in future to be kept at every Labour Exchange to render first-aid to those who should be offered a situation. Applicants are requested not to tease the officials. * * * * * JARGON. From a speech at a Medical conference:-- "He was ashamed of the term 'shell-shock.' It was a bad word, and should be wiped out of the vocabulary of every scientific man. It was really molecular abnormality of the nervous system, characterised by abnormal reactions to ordinary stimuli."--_Daily Paper_. We must try to remember this. * * * * * A MODEST ESTIMATE. From a publisher's advertisement:-- "Baroness Orczy has laid the world under a fresh debt of gratitude. 7/- net."--"_Times" Literary Supplement_. * * * * * "The question one could naturally put is, 'Has the millennium arrived, when the lion and the lamb shall lay together?'"--_Monthly Paper_. Let's hope, at all events, that the produce won't be a cockatrice's egg. * * * * * "This is the anniversary of the death of Robert Southey in 1843. Perhaps his most celebrated poem is the delightful 'Ode to a Skylark,' the beginning of which 'Hail to thee, blithe spirit,' is known to every school child."--_New York Evening Journal_. It seems that Truth still stands in need of propaganda in America. * * * * * [Illustration: _Amateur Photographer (on a conducted tour in France)._"CHARMING SPOT; BUT RATHER DISAPPOINTING. I _QUITE_ HOPED IT WOULD HAVE BEEN ALL SMASHED UP."] * * * * * FINANCIAL INTELLIGENCE. The decision of _The Westminster Gazette_ to return to its old figure of a penny must not be taken as a sign that prices generally are coming down. On the contrary there is every indication that they are rising and will still rise, as the following symptomatic scraps of news, gathered from all parts of the country, go to prove:--