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punishment would have followed. But Walls slumbered on undisturbed, until a terrific roar in his ear caused him to wake with a start. What had happened? He seized his rifle and peered into the darkness. Then, to his amazement, he saw the boulder before him rise to its feet and shamble off into the night. It was an ox, and it had lowed!

You might think his luck finished there. But no. The officer and his men came stealthily up, and Walls un-blushingly declared that he had heard the foe approaching. It may sound incredible, but it is a fact that a few minutes later the enemy did actually appear, and were, of course, driven hack after the customary decimation.

And Walls unhesitatingly accepted the congratulations of his superior on his vigilance, and did not even blench when assured that his was the finest imitation ever heard of the lowing of an ox.

Yours ever, One of the Punch Brigade.

Officer. "Didn't I tell yer 'e was no good? Look at 'im—playin' football when us fellers is drillin'!"

"The German resistance is formidable but the allies' artillery has forced the enemy to retire from some trenches abandinging prisoners dead, and wounded."—Buenos Aires Standard.

This gives the lie to the many stories of German callousness that we hear.

[A fifteen-minutes' speech on affairs by a public man has been added to the programme of the Empire music-hall.]

There is no truth that the late Viceroy of Ireland is to appear at the Alhambra in a brief address, explaining why he chose the title of "Tara."

All efforts to induce Mr. Masterman to appear at the Holborn Empire next week in a burlesque of The Seats of the Mighty have failed.

Great pressure is being brought to bear upon Mr. Bernard Shaw to induce him to add gaiety to the Palladium programme next week by a twenty-minutes' exposure of England's folly, hypocrisy, fatuity and crime, a subject on which he knows even more than is to be known.

Up to the present moment Mr. H. G. Wells has refused all offers to appear at the Palace in the song from Patience, "When I first put this uniform on."

Any statement that Mr. Edmund Gosse is to appear at the Coliseum at every performance next week, in a little sketch entitled Swinging the Censor, is to be taken with salt.

A similar incredulity should probably be adopted in regard to the alluring rumour that Mr. Compton Mackenzie will also contribute at the same house a nightly telephonic sketch from Capri, "What Tiberius thinks of 'Sinister Street.'"

Negotiations are still pending, though with little chance of success, between the management of the Hippodrome and Canon Rawnsley, with a view to his giving a brief address nightly on the subject "How to write a War sonnet in ten minutes."

We have good reason to fear that, in spite of reiterated announcements of their engagement, Mr. Max Pemberton and Mr. Max Beerbohm will not appear on Valentine's Day, and subsequently, at the Chiswick Empire in a topical War duologue as "The Two Max."