Page:Punch Vol 148.djvu/536

We understand that General von Hindenburg, having now been commanded South by the Emperor to take charge of the Italian campaign after his successive exploits in the East and West, is negotiating with Miss Margaret Cooper for the Continental singing rights of that popular ditty, Waltz me round again, Willie.

The announcement that Stonehenge is for sale comes at an opportune moment, when we are all looking for something handy to throw at the Kaiser.

I don't know why I am in Ballybun. I volunteered for the Front, and the Government sent me at once as far to the West as the Atlantic Ocean would let it. Perhaps it had seen me shoot. Cecilia thinks it had seen me in puttees. It is true that with me they never stay put, but in a good deep trench this would never be noticed by the men behind. You have guessed right; Cecilia and I are related by marriage.

Cecilia is the most delightful woman in the world, but I fear she disapproves of Ballybun. She says it is so different from dear Ealing. In Ealing, she says, no lady going shopping would be knocked down by a pig coming out of a grocer's shop with a straw in his mouth. Perhaps the pigs in Ealing do not chew straws. And Cecilia was not knocked down. And didn't Mrs. Quinn apologise in the most handsome manner to the sweet foreign lady? This, Cecilia said, was the last straw, as if an Englishwoman, even on the Continent, could ever be a foreigner. It has been no use explaining that people from the next county are foreigners in Ballybun. I fear this still rankles in Cecilia's mind.

Cecilia thinks we are unpunctual in the West of Ireland. We are not. As I have tried to show her, Time, according to the greatest philosophers, has no real existence; and we are all philosophers. If a meeting is summoned for half-past three on Monday "evening," as long as the chairman is in the chair by six on Wednesday no one worries. That is why we all live so long in the West. There was old Patsy Gollogher of Lisnahinch Cross Roads who remembered the Battle of Waterloo and, if you gave him a glass or twe, the Spanish Armada; he simply refused to die. They had to induce him. Cecilia will not believe in Patsy Gollogher. It is true they promised us our house in six days and that we did not get in for six weeks. But as I pointed out to her the people here are mystics, especially the working-men. She said mystics would not paper half the drawing-room wrong side up and then leave the work for two days to go to the races. I said they would.

The little house looked beautiful once we had settled in. Perhaps they should not have washed their paint-brushes in the bath-room. They don't, it seems, in Ealing. Fogarty, the paper-hanger (he's not a real paper-hanger, of course, but his cousin had a sore thumb), clean forgot one strip of paper in the drawing-room. He told me he had it all wet on the back verandah, but Mulligan's goat came through the hedge and ate it on him. Cecilia says it is absurd to think an able-bodied man Fogarty would allow so small a goat to knock him down and then sit on him eating wall-paper. It is no use explaining to her, but she regards Fogarty as untruthful. It's a pity, as they cannot match the paper owing to the War, and it was the last strip. Still, it was hardly Fogarty's fault, and with the big screen in front of it no one could tell it wasn't there.

Fogarty is an invaluable man and can do anything. He has never anything particular to do, and so I have been sending him on errands chiefly to the waterworks to implore them to send our water up. Thanks to him a trickle came through yesterday, but someone else has it to-day. In the intervals of water-finding Fogarty is hanging the pictures for us. Fogarty tells me—and he is always ready for a little conversation—that all his family are born water-finders. I wonder if Cecilia will notice the marks of Fogarty's boots on the top of the piano. It was a wedding present. I must give Fogarty a hint.

Lunch was late again to-day. Mary Ellen had mislaid the leg of mutton, Fogarty found it for her. That man is a born finder. I told Fogarty to find a good place in the hall for the hat-rack and put it up. I then went in to lunch. It was our first lunch together in peace since the last painter went out. I filled Cecilia a glass of wine and I was just about to say, "At last, darling, we have our peaceful little home to ourselves, free of painters and plasterers and paper-hangers and plumbers!" when Mary Ellen burst in the door with a shriek, "For the love of Heaven, Sir and Ma'am, come quick, Fogarty has us all drowned!"

I rushed into the hall, and my breath was taken away by a jet of water which swept from the end of the hall into the road. Fogarty, it seems, had driven the nail for the hat-rack into a concealed water-pipe. He was trying to stop the stream, which came down one of his sleeves and out at the other, with an ancient pocket-handkerchief, muttering to console himself, "Look at that now, and I only making a small hole. Will nobody turn her off at the main?"

Fogarty had found water.

On the retirement of a public official:—

His intentions with reference to remaining a valued and respected member of the community are understood to be indefinite."

Natal Mercury.