ou how this may be,
'Tis far as I take the tale;
For it's lives upon lives ago, you see,
That the Barbary men set sail;
So I only know she was ivory white,
As white as a sea-bird lone;
And her eyes were wonderful blue and bright
And hard as a sapphire stone.

* * * * *

The New Rowing.

"Give a last pull at the oar with clenched teeth and knit
muscles."--_The Young Man._

_The Cork Examiner_ on Sir PERCY SCOTT'S letter:--

"'If a battleships is not safe either on the high seas or in
rabour,' he asks, 'what is the use of a battlesh?'"

To be more accurate, this is how one puts it to one's neighbour after
dinner, when--the ladies having removed themselves, and the necessity
for mere social chit-chat being over--we men are at last able to devote
ourselves to the affairs of empire.

* * * * *

[Illustration: LIGHT CAR TRIALS.

_Spectator_ (_to exhausted competitor reduced to running on trial
hill_). "WHAT WOULD YOU SAY IF THAT CAR RAN AWAY FROM YOU?"

_Competitor._ "THANK HEAVEN!"]

* * * * *

OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

(_By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks._)

The title of a book should be a guide to its contents, a simple enough
rule which some authors overlook in their anxiety to start being clever
and eccentric on the very outside cover. The book-buying public will
appreciate Miss M. BETHAM-EDWARDS' title, _From an Islington Window,
Pages of Reminiscent Romance_ (SMITH, ELDER), and will gather from it
that this is a book for those who prefer a long life and a quiet one to
the short and thrilling. Incidentally I am relieved from divulging any
of the plots in order to demonstrate the nature of the twelve short
pieces embodied; enough to quote two typical sub-titles, "Mr. Lovejoy's
Love-story" and "Miss Prime," and to put upon the whole the label of the
author's own choice, "Early Victorian." Everybody knows where and what
Islington is and the sort of minor tragedy and comedy that would be
likely to occur in the lives of its inhabitants in the last reign but
one. No one would look there for epoch-making crises, but many will find
a longed-for relief from the speeding-up tendencies of modern romance.
Lastly, but for a tendency at times to affectation, the style of the
writer is as graceful and elegant as her themes are homely and serene,
and that, I think, is all about it.

* * *