Page:Punch Vol 148.djvu/258

Among certain much-needed journalistic reforms I should put almost first the necessity of printing photographs of the ladies and gentlemen who write letters to the Press. It is of the highest importance that we should know what they are like, should be able, so to speak, to feel their bumps. It would also be a means of eliminating the anonymous correspondent.

The principal runners in the Correspondence Stakes to-day is no longer Algernon Ashton. What has happened to Algernon? It is true that he retired formally from the lists some few years ago, leaving a book of his letters behind; but he returned in full force, with a baby. The baby did wonderful things in his father's missives―expressed his opinion of the Kaiser in no lethargic manner; but even with this domestic incentive Algernon is not what he was. He seems to have lost his nerve. That bold pen no longer rushes in as once it did. It is now quite safe for a journalist to mention 1828 as the year of Beethoven's death. No one would mind. But once Algernon, more in sorrow than in anger, yet enormously surprised, would have set right a misled world by stating that the year was really 1827. And mortar can now drop like rain from interstices in the brickwork of Martin Tupper's grave and no editor be asked to find room for Algernon's grief and horror. Not that he is wholly mute. Not at all. But he is not what he was; le roi est mort.

Yet he has successors.

Le roi est mort! Vivent les rois! For the successors to the throne are twain. It is like that of Brentford―it has two occupants, and their names are J. Landfear Lucas and A. Kipling Common. Both these gentlemen are a notch above Algernon. They deal with larger events; are more or less publicists, while Algernon was content to necrologise and quote Haydn's Dictionary of Dates. They deal also with ideas, which Algernon scorned to do. You find them everywhere; and J. Landfear Lucas never omits to add to his name the fact that he belongs to the Spectacle Makers' Company. A. Kipling Common may or not make spectacles: he withholds all information about it; it is the only point on which he is reticent. Perhaps he makes lorgnettes or pince-nez. Perhaps the only pair of spectacles he ever made was at cricket. Whatever he makes, he keeps the fact to himself. What kind of spectacles J. Landfear Lucas makes I do not know; but the next time I have need of any I shall insist upon trying his. "Give me a pair of J. Landfear Lucas's," I shall say to the optician, and insist upon having those and no others. The signature of the maker will, I am sure, be on the case. The only fear I have is that wearing them will force me into writing letters to the Press. Perhaps A. Kipling Common wears a pair, and hence his downfall.

J. Landfear Lucas's letters would make an enormous volume of very mixed reading, and would need a good index, which might be prepared by Sir Sidney Lee or the Editor of Notes and Queries. The only subject on which he's has never written is his middle name. Why, I always want to know, does he so dread the soil? What has it done to him? His terror cannot be complete, because I find a letter from him in an recent issue of Land and Water. One must suppose that the presence of water just saved the situation.

A. Kipling Common is a more inspiring name to me. There is something breezy in it―a suggestion of gorse bushes and heather. It cheers up any paper in which it occurs, irrespective of the subject of the letter above it. "And did you once see Shelley Plain?" was the old question. The next generation will be asked, "And did you once see Kipling Common?" All will be able to reply, "Yes―in all the papers."

I imagine these two gentlemen's day to be one long excitement. They rise early after a sleepless night and straightway fall on the morning papers. J. Landfear Lucas has his spectacles on in a jiffy, and, blue pencil in hand, searches for slips, misapprehensions, incomplete references, and defective information. Meanwhile A. Kipling Common is similarly at work elsewhere. Terrible fellows, they miss nothing. And the joy of settling down to the delight of composing their epistles! "There is a pleasure in poetic pains," wrote Cowper, but how much greater the pleasure in writing letters that shall instruct and correct! One wonders how the Lucasian spectacles are made at all―that he has time for anything but single eye-glasses.

Among students of cryptograms and such entertaining mysteries it has been suggested that J. Landfear Lucas and A. Kipling Common are the same. Knowing that a point comes when editors kick, one of these indomitable correspondents invented the other in order to be able to write just twice as many letters as he would otherwise be permitted. The late Ignatius Donnelly firmly believed this; just as Francis Bacon (who in Mr. Snaith's new romance passes a bad half-crown on the Master of Balliol) and William Shakspeare were the same, or, at any rate, wrote each other's works.

A comparison of the signatures reveals extraordinary, nay, uncanny, resemblances. Look at them: J. Landfear Lucas, A. Kipling Common. Each, you will see, begins with an initial, and these initials rhyme: A. and J. We then pass on to a middle name printed in full, each having two syllables; and then to the final surnames again, each of two syllables. And the two signatures exactly balance: J. Landfear Lucas and A. Kipling Common. The student will observe that each has the same number of letters―fourteen―only one more than the fatal thirteen: a very significant point to newspaper readers. Note too the remarkable association between Land and Common. It is only after the signature that any marked difference begins, for it is then that J. Landfear Lucas always adds "Spectacle Makers' Company." This is, however, probably merely a blind.

I do not press the double theory. To me it is fantastic; but in occult circles it is much canvassed and many extremely interesting discussions have been held. It is even rumoured that, one midnight recently, an investigator was shown, by a man in an iron mask, in the faint light of a dark lantern, beneath one of the Adelphi arches, a letter signed K. Lipfear Commas; but of this I have no proof.

I must add that no such mystery attaches to the name of Algernon Ashton. He, at any rate, is real, and has been seen playing dominoes in the Café Royal.

["There is... much exhortation of the Administration to 'stand pat' upon American rights, to avoid being made the cat's paw of anybody's diplomacy."―"Times" Washington Correspondent.]

"His eyes light up as he recalls the song which the Alpins sang that day: 'Nous n'aurez pas l'Alsace et la Lorraine!'"

Daily News.

Those Chasseurs Alpins got off lightly. We remember an incident at school when we made no worse a mistake in our French lesson and there was a great deal of trouble about it.