Shanty._)

Old Bill Barnacle sticks to his ship,
He never is ill on the stormiest trip;
Upside down he crosses the ocean--
If you do that you _enjoy_ the motion.

Barnacle's family grows and grows;
Little relations arrive in rows;
And the quicker the barnacles grow, you know,
The slower the ship doth go--yo ho!

Thousands of barnacles, small and great,
Stick to the jolly old ship of State;
So we mustn't be cross if she seems to crawl--
It's rather a marvel she goes at all.

A. P. H.

* * * * *

"Priests preach the want of brotherhood in the Anglican Church,
but many, I am sorry to say, do not practise what they preach."

_Letter to Daily Paper._

Is not this carrying the reactionary spirit a little too far?

* * * * *

AT THE PLAY.

"THE DRAGON."

Some day, no doubt, plays like _Mr. Wu_ and _The Dragon_ (by R. E.
JEFFREY) will be forbidden by the League of Nations. Meanwhile let us
allow ourselves to be diverted by the motiveless villainies of crooked
cruel "Chinks" like _Wang Fu Chang_, who sold opium at a terrific
profit in Mayfair, hung his servants up by their thumbs and belonged
to a Society of Elder Brethren, as to whose activities we were given
no clue, unless indeed their job was the kidnapping of Younger Sisters
for Wicked Mandarins.

For _Jack Stacey_, who opened the Prologue in Loolong with head in
hands and moaned invocations of the Deity (a version doubtless of
the well-known gambit, "'Hell!' said the Duchess"), had his little
daughter kidnapped at birth or thereabouts (by _Wang Fu_, as it
happened), and never saw her again till, after eighteen years of
opium-doping--between the Prologue and the First Act--he called upon
the same _Wang Fu_ (just before dinner) with a peremptory message from
a very bad and powerful mandarin that if little Miss _Che Fu_ were not
packed off to China by eleven that same evening the Elder Brethren
would be one short by midnight. _Che Fu_, I ought to say, passed as
_Wang's_ daughter, but was so English, you know, to look at that
nobody could really believe it.

Of course _Jack_ didn't recognise her as his own daughter, but equally
of course we did, and knew that she would be rescued by her impetuous
boy-lover and restored to her real father; but not before great
business with opium pipes, pivoting statues of goddesses, inoperative
revolvers, gongs, strangulat