By the way, has any candid merchant ever advertised a Good Riddance
Sale?

* * *

Much has been written about Mr. Balfour in the last twelvemonth; and Mr.
Balfour himself has published a book, a copy of which we are awaiting
with more or less impatience. Mr. Balfour is not considered a success as
a statesman, because he has always looked upon politics merely as a
game; and Frank Harris once wrote that if A. B. had had to work for a
living he might have risen to original thought--whatever that may imply.

* * *

What we have always marveled at is Balfour's capacity for mental
detachment. In the first year of the war he found time to deliver,
extempore, the Gifford lectures, and in the next year he published
"Theism and Humanism." It is said, of course, that he had a great gift
for getting or allowing other people to do his work in the war council
and the admiralty; but that does not entirely explain his brimming mind.

* * *

"There is a fine old man," as one of our readers reported his Irish
gardener as saying of A. B. "Did you know Mr. Balfour?" he was asked.
"Did I know him?" was the reply. "Didn't I help rotten-egg him in
Manchester twinty-five years ago!"

* * *

Col. Fanny Butcher relates that the average reader who patronizes the
New York public library prefers Conan Doyle's detective stories to any
others. Quite naturally. There is more artistry in Poe, and the tales
about the Frenchman, Arsene Lupin, are ten times more ingenious than
Doyle's; but Doyle has infused the adventures of Sherlock Holmes with
the undefinable something known as romance, and that has preserved them.
The great majority of detective stories are merely ingenious.

* * *

Col. Butcher says she uses "The Crock of Gold" to test the minds of
people. A friend of ours employs "Zuleika Dobson" for the same purpose.
What literary acid do _you_ apply?

* * *

Our compliments to Mrs. Borah, who possesses a needed sense of humor.
"If," she is reported as saying to her husband, "if it were not for the
pleasures of life you might enjoy it."

* * *

A librarian confides to us that she was visited by a young lady who
wished to see a _large_ map of France. She was writing a paper on the
battlefields of France for a culture club, and she just couldn't find
Flanders' Fields and No Man's Land on any of the maps