The trusty ship gets to England at 2.30, the equally trusty train arrives at Victoria a couple of hours later. I am in capital time for Mrs. ANYBODY'S "last Any-day."
"How well you are looking," observes my kind hostess, pouring out a cup of tea.
"And I am feeling well," I return; "and all this good health I owe to twenty minutes on the continent."
And these last words sound so like the tag to a piece that they shall serve (by the kind permission of the British public) as the title and the end to an article.
DEAR MR. PUNCH,--My pater reads the Bristol newspapers, but I don't, because there's never any pirates or red Indians in them, but happening to look in one the other day I noticed an awfully good thing. It said that at a place called Stapleton all the parents were very indignant at the way in which the schoolmistress had been treated by the manigers, and to show their symperthy they decided to keep their children from school. The school was nearly empty in consequents. Now I don't think my schoolmaster has half enough sympathy shown him. He does know how to cane, certainly, but he isn't really such a beast as fellows make out--at least not just the day or so before the holidays begin--and would you mind telling parents that they ought to keep their boys at home for a week or a fortnight after next term begins, to show how much they symperthise with him? Poor chap, he has lots of trouble--I know he has, because I give him some.
BAWBEES THANKFULLY RECEIVED.--A National Scottish Memorial to BURNS is in the Ayr. "Surely," writes a perfervid one, "BURNS did as much for our country and the world as SCOTT, yet how very different the monuments of the two in Edinburgh and Glasgow! I am sure no Scotchman would grudge his mite, however poor, for such a purpose." Quite so. But it would take a good many "Cotter's Saturday mites" to build anything like the Scott Memorial in Princes Street. And what is this that the Rev. Dr. BURRELL, of New York, said in presenting a new panel for the Ayr statue of BURNS from American lovers of the poet? "The stream of pilgrims," he observed, "from America to the banks of the Doon was twice as large as that which found its way to the banks of the Avon." Then why should not the stream of dollars follow, and erect a colossal "Burns Enlightening the Nations" somewhere down the Clyde--say, at the Heads of Ayr? _Hamlet_ beaten by _Tam O'Shanter_, and Avon taking a back seat to Doon! Flodden is, indeed, avenged.