When the 'prentice musketeer shoulders his arquebus and intimates a design to charge bayonet, stand from under promptly. Delays are dangerous. Iscariot with his twelve pieces of discredited coin folded in his turban figured as a tight-rope dancer on the occasion of his very last appearance on any stage. Tasteless and intangible was the kiss that was prematurely discharged in midair and never, never came. Even the joys of courtship suffer a temporary eclipse when Johnnie is found behind the sofa. Exasperating to a like degree is the humorous episode at which we dare not laugh, yet can not die. It is alleged that rural homes decorated with chromographic mottoes are largely responsible for the overcrowded state of the paresis wards in our asylums. How much of the phenomenal hereditary predisposition to recklessness which characterized the next generation after the war was attributable to the enforced repression of risibles at Dress Parade may never be definitely ascertained. This much we know: When the safety valve is strapped down, boilers are in danger. She who kindles fire with gasoline, and penetrates the undiscovered country by that illuminated route, leaves few to pity and none to praise. But the victim of an over-fermentation of merriment has sympathizers numerous as the fashions of grandfather's hat. When the young recruit, twenty per cent. pork, thirty per cent. beans, forty per cent. patriotism and ten per cent. soldier, stands up to be exhibited, and a score of his best girls, each compounded in five equal parts of beauty and brightness, grace, gush and giggle, gaze in ravenous, enraptured solicitude on the dreadful performance, with their steel walls of restraint riveted tightly around them,--well, the consequences are to be unquestionably counted in as a part of the general havoc of war.