Page:Punch Vol 148.djvu/403

Elder Sister (firmly) to her little sister, who has been playing at soldiers and is thoroughly bored and now clamouring for her doll). "No, baby, you can't have your dollie. What are we to say to our children when they ask what we were doing in 1915?"

We are scrupulously careful in our neighbourhood to do and say nothing that can disparage the great effort being made by our rivals at Christie's in aid of the Red Cross. All the same we are privately of the opinion that we do this sort of thing better down our way. No one can claim to have actually invented our method; it just evolved itself. But it is working like a machine.

It began last October, when the Rector, who is one of our most progressive farmers, announced his intention of selling his little Jersey cow by auction in aid of the Red Cross. We had always envied him that cow; she was the daintiest little creature in the parish and said to be a fabulous milker for her size. So the bidding was pretty brisk. The Colonel got her for £27 10s.—an outside price, but she looked remarkably well in his paddock. We offered our congratulations and imagined the incident was closed. But the Colonel was never happy about it.

"I've got it into my head," he would say, "that that cow belongs by rights to the Red Cross. I don't believe that I shall be able to keep her with any satisfaction to myself."

He tried to square his conscience by sending the milk to the hospital, but it wasn't any good. So he put her up (for the benefit of the Red Cross) to public auction on the first Saturday in December, and asked all the more likely buyers to lunch on that occasion. When she got hung up for a time at £26 Dr. Sharpe "simply out of decency" sprang her to twenty-eight. It would be intolerable if the Colonel were to lose by it, he said. There was some confusion of idea there perhaps, but the principle was sound.

Somehow this little auction of the Colonel's set a precedent which we felt bound to follow later on. Of course the Doctor couldn't keep the cow. He recognised that at once, the more so as he had neither a field nor a shed to put her in. So his auction was rushed on without delay. It was the best of the series so far, being preceded by quite a big At Home, during which the cow was led round the lawn before the drawing-room windows. She cost_me £31, and I sent my cheque to the Red Cross.

It was about this stage that the Cow Committee came into existence, in response to a general demand that the thing should be put on a more definite basis. The Committee consisted simply—it will be seen that there was a perfect simplicity about the whole affair—of those who had made bids. It met at the school-house every Wednesday night to consider and draw up the Regulations; but the cow had changed hands three times before these were complete. I am requested by my colleagues to publish them here as a guide to other neighbourhoods who may wish to raise money for the War Funds. I ought to add that it need not, of course, be a cow. Any desirable object, from an umbrella to a rare