How our little ones' hearts would flutter When your intelligent eye peeped out, Saying as plainly as words could utter, "Hurry up with that Brussels-sprout!" How we chortled with simple joy When you bit that impudent errand-boy; "That'll teach him," we heard you mutter, "Whether I've got the gout." Fairest, rarest in all the Zoo, you Bound us tight in affection's bond; Now you're gone from the friends that knew you, Wails the whaup in the Waders' Pond; Wails the whaup and the seamews keen a Song of sorrow; but you, Georgina, Frisk for ever where warm winds woo you, There, in the Great Beyond. ALGOL. * * * * * [Illustration: TECHNICALITIES OF DEMOBILISATION. _Officer_. "WHAT ARE THESE MEN'S TRADES OR CALLINGS, SERGEANT?" _Sergeant_. "SLOSHER, SLABBER AND WUZZER, SIR."] * * * * * A CONTRA APPRECIATION. LORD NORTHCLIFFE has recently contributed a remarkably outspoken criticism of Mr. LLOYD GEORGE by way of "send-off" to his latest journal, _The New Illustrated_. The following extracts from an article about to appear in _The Pacific Monthly_, kindly communicated to us by wireless, seem to indicate that the PREMIER is indisposed to take it lying down:-- "In a letter recently published without my authority I said that I was unable to control or influence him. This was true at the time and remains true now. Time and again have efforts been made to harness his energies to the State, but they have never succeeded. The responsibilities of office are irksome to his imperious temperament. There is something almost tragic in a figure, equipped with the qualities of an hereditary autocrat, endeavouring to accommodate himself to the needs of a democracy. The spectacle of this purple Emperor of the Press, with his ear constantly glued to the ground, is not wanting in pathos. With him the idols of yesterday are the pet aversions of to-day. He denounces me as 'a political chameleon, taking on the colour of those who at the moment happen to be his associates.' But what are you to say of a man who clamours for a saviour of the situation and then turns him into a cock-shy; of a Napoleon who is continually retiring to Elba when things are not going as he likes; of a politician who claims the privileges but refuses the duties of a Dictator? "It is obvious that he is still labouring under the hallucination that the War was a duel between him and the KAISER; that he 'downed' his antagonist single-handed, and that the prospects of a stable peace have been shattered by my failure to include him among the British Peace Delegates. So, all in a moment, the 'Welsh Wizard' is converted into the miserable creature of the Tory Junkers--a man without 'high moral courage,' 'wide knowledge' or 'large ideas.'