I find myself coming back to the bride, as one does when mortals are married. Here suddenly the homely muse of one of our republican poets overtakes me: This George and Mary Windsor must have lots of sense as well as dust, to let their only daughter marry a man who is quite ordinary—a man at least who never had as good a start in life as dad, but is a boy of their own town, grew up there and there settles down. Well, that is how it ought to be, and if he sticks to business he will thrive and prosper till he may stand before kings and queens some day. And what if the new couple have to work and plan and scrimp and save a few years till they make their pile and can put on a better style? If they attempt it nothing loth it will be better for them both. Then hail the bridegroom and the bride! Let the nuptial knot be tied! Whatever others may prefer, her for him and him for her! “MURDERING BEAUTY” At the Butirki prison in Moscow, say certain Frenchmen who were formerly there as involuntary guests of the Bolsheviki, there was a beautiful Lettish girl, at about the remorseless age of fifteen, who acted as official executioner, shooting her victims expertly in the back when they had been chosen by lot and led before her. The brawny Jack Ketch of the old tradition had yielded to a mere flapper, “with unerring aim and a lust for blood.” The French will be French! My mind goes back to some thousands of fine poems and of gallant speeches which have been made by this fine and gallant race upon the theme of “murdering beauty.” What after all is so deadly as a lovely eye? It stabs deep with a glint, slays with a glance, and utterly consumes with a level gaze. There is no armour proof against it. Whenever beauty walks abroad it leaves its path strewn with the wrecks of foolish men who have encountered it. It rises in the morning, like the sun for glory, and kills off a few swains who are outside its casement when first it looks out at the new day. It lisps its dutiful orisons, tastes matutinal nectar, and comes forth to begin its proper business. Walking beside some clear brook it topples one venturer after another into the sympathetic flood. On the smooth enamelled green, where daisies pie the meadow, beauty does its fatal work no less ruthlessly than in secluded arbours or umbrageous grottoes. Then mounted on its favourite courser it takes to the hunt, leaving to others the lighter task of bringing down the boar or catching up with the fox, but itself more deadly among the human quarry who, though hunters, are at last the hunted. Finally twilight, the end of the day, candles, spinet, the dulcimer and the soft recorders, witching sounds and more bewitching silences; but still beauty goes on its conquering course. Not even midnight dims it. When beauty has retired from mortal sight, the lover who had not the luck to come within its range and so be slaughtered, lies disconsolate upon his