itics should be
encouraged.

Mr. ROGER FRY here rose to point out that the test of a picture is not
the pleasure which it imparts, as the last speaker seemed to think, but
the pain. The sooner the public got that fact into its thick head the
better would it be for those artists who were not so clay-souled as to
allow stuffy conventions to interfere with the development of their
personality.

Mr. D.W. GRIFFITH said that he had never heard so much talk about
pictures, with so little reference to himself. It was he who invented
"The Birth of a Nation" and "Intolerance," and he was the Picture King,
and as such he wished to tell them that the best Art critic in the world
couldn't hold a candle to a very ordinary Press agent. (Uproar, during
which the meeting broke up.)

* * * * *

[Illustration: _The "Nut" of the Regiment_ (_reading Army order re
dress_). "BY JOVE, MAJOR, THIS IS SERIOUS! SHIRTS, COLLARS AND TIES HAVE
GOT TO BE THE SAME COLOUR AS UNIFORM. IT JOLLY WELL MEANS THAT WE'LL HAVE
TO GET A NEW UNIFORM EVERY TIME WE HAVE A COLLAR WASHED."]

* * * * *

MEDITATIONS OF MARCUS O'REILLY.

THE GREAT DOG FIGHT.

Next to the beauty of its girls my little Western home is noted for two
things--the ferocity of its dogs and its bountiful provision for
assuaging an attack of thirst. For the latter there are fifteen houses,
ten of which have licences and the rest back-doors. We are by birth a
temperate people, but there is much salt in the air.

Our dogs are very like ourselves, as peaceable and well-conducted as can
be, except when some rascal takes up their challenge and makes faces at
them or trails a tail of too much pretension and too suddenly in their
neighbourhood. Then the fur is apt to fly.

"What a degrading spectacle a dog-fight is!" Moriarty, who takes up the
collection in church and has thus a semi-ecclesiastical status in life,
which shows itself in his speech, said this to me only last evening.
There were about a hundred of us trying to hide this degrading spectacle
from the police and other innocent people, and Moriarty had just lost
three-and-sixpence on Casey's dog. "A degrading spectacle indeed," said
I. "If Casey's dog had held out two minutes longer he had the other dog
beat. I am disappointed in Casey's dog." It _was_ degrading, and I am
glad I had only half-a-crown on it. So I paid up to our collector of
rates and taxes and came hom