"You'll hear more of this," said our hostess, when we had reported our raid. "Old Miss Mendip lives there--a regular tartar; all kinds of views; writes to the papers."
In a subsequent issue of the local weekly we found the following:--
_To the Editor of "The Inshot Times, Great and Little Budford Chronicle and Home Counties Advertiser_."
SIR,--Even in _war-time_, when one cannot call our souls our own, we may surely expect the privacy of individuals and the rights of property to receive _some_ respect. An Englishman's home is still his castle, though the debased morals and decayed manners of modern _Society_ (?) seem to blind its members to the fact.
I wish to give publicity in your pages to a disgraceful _outrage_ of which I have been made the victim. On Tuesday last I was rudely awakened from my afternoon rest by the sound of a large motor-car. As I did not expect visitors I proceeded to the window in order to discover to what the _intrusion_ might be due. What was my _astonishment_ to discover that the vehicle contained a party of four _perfect strangers_. Three of them, I regret to state, were wounded officers; they were being driven by one of the modern games-playing cigarette-smoking young women to whom the old-fashioned word "_lady_" seems so _singularly_ inapplicable. Their sole object in entering appeared to be the perpetration of a senseless practical _joke_, for after _careering_ round my garden at a pace which I can only describe as _unwomanly_, they went off by the way they had come.
My gardener, who witnessed the incident, tells me that on reaching the road they stopped the vehicle and celebrated the success of their inane efforts by _shrieking_ with that unrestrained mirth which jars so painfully on refined ears.
[Illustration: _Orderly Officer_. "HOW MANY HORSES ARE HERE, PICKET?"
_Picket (a little fed-up)_. "ER--HORSE LINE, 'SHUN! FROM THE RIGHT--NUMBER!!"]
"While the horse doeuvres were being served, the Kaiser, etc."
At the Imperial table, it will be observed, they put the horse before the _carte_.
"He held several Court appointments, including those of Keeper of the Privy PuPrse to the Prince"--_The Star_.
It is not every Keeper of the Privy Purse who thus manages to double the initial capital.