Page:Punch Vol 148.djvu/443

Vicar's Daughter. "Where did you get those nice khaki mittens, Daisy? Did your mother knit them for you?"

Daisy. "No, Miss. Daddy sent them home from the Front at Christmas."

I am a Special Detective. It came about in this way. When the Special Constables were being enrolled I offered my services for duty on Saturday afternoons from 4.30 to 5, so as to allow the regular policeman to go off for afternoon tea. I couldn't volunteer to serve any longer as I had to have a singing lesson at 5.15. However, they refused my offer, and as I still wanted to help I appointed myself an unofficial Special Detective—the only one.

I don't suppose you would ever guess what I was if you saw me in the street, because I always go about disguised when on duty. When I am disguised I can detect things which I should never dream of detecting in propria persona. For instance, were I just wearing my usual clothes and my ordinary face, I should not attempt to interfere with an armed burglar in the execution of what, rightly or wrongly, he conceives to be his duty. I should go home. If the occasion demanded it, I should even go to the length of remaining at home until I had grown a moustache, or a beard, or a whisker or perhaps the complete set, according to the requirements of the character I proposed to assume.

I remember once detecting a desperate villain in the act of emptying a perambulator full of practically new children into the canal at Basingstoke. As I happened at the moment to be disguised in the totally unsuitable garb of a member of the Junior Athenæum Club I refrained from interfering. I contented myself with tapping him on the shoulder (I forget which), explaining my difficulty to him, advising him that I should return in due course and severely arrest him, and finally warning him that anything he might say in the meantime would be taken down, suitably edited, and used in evidence against him.

I then returned to town and commenced at once to grow a luxuriant vegetation of whiskers. You see, it was my intention to disguise myself as an Anabaptist, and then go back to Basingstoke and seize my man, if possible, red-handed; if not, whatever colour his hand happened to be. However, hair-raising is not so easy as it looks, for although I read all the ghost stories I could lay my hand on, and actually spent several hours a day under the forcing-pot in the company of the rhubarb, it was a long time before my whiskers were long enough to infuriate Mr. Frank Richardson.

The consequence was that when I eventually returned to the scene of the crime I found that the villain had completed his thankless task and had in all probability gone home to a guilty meal. The indifference displayed by the criminal classes to their impending fate is proverbial. Yet how this heartless desperado ever summoned up the effrontery to clear off after I had expressly informed him that I was coming back to arrest him passes my comprehension. Anyhow, I examined the surface of the canal thoroughly, but as it was quite smooth, without a hole in it anywhere, it is just possible that I was mistaken, and that the miscreant was only intending to wash his offspring. Or, again, they may not have been children at all, but merely turnips or cauliflowers. Personally, I am often unable to distinguish between a very new child and a turnip. I once mentioned this failing to a friend. He was a family man, and simply said, "Ah, wait till you have a baby of your own,"