the waitress has
been duly noted)_. "HUM! YOU SEEM TO 'AVE COME BACK 'ALF FRENCH."]

* * * * *

THE GIPSY SOLDIER

The gipsy wife came to my door with pegs and brooms to sell
They make by many a roadside fire and many a greenwood dell,
With bee-skeps and with baskets wove of osier, rush and sedge,
And withies from the river-beds and brambles from the hedge.

With her stately grace, like PHARAOH'S queen (for all her broken
shoon),
You'd marvel one so tall and proud should ever ask a boon,
But "living's dear for us poor folk" and "money can't be had,"
And "her man's in Mespotania" and "times is cruel bad!"

Yes, times is cruel bad, we know, and passing strange also,
And it's strange as anything I've heard that gipsy men should go
To lands through which their forbears trod from some unknown abode
The way that ended long ago upon the Portsmouth Road.

I wonder if the Eastern skies and Eastern odours seem
Familiar to that gipsy man, as memories of a dream;
Does Tigris' flow stir ancient dreams from immemorial rest
Ere ever gipsy poached the trout of Itchen and of Test?

Does something in him seem to know those red and arid lands
Where dust of ancient cities sleeps beneath the drifted sands?
Do Kurdish girls with lustrous eyes beneath their drooping lids
And Eastern babes look strangely like the Missis and the kids?

I wonder if the waving palms, when desert winds do blow,
In their dry rustling seem to sing a song he used to know;
Or does he only curse the heat and wish that he were laid
Beneath the spread of RUFUS' oaks or Harewood's beechen shade?

Well, luck be with the gipsy man and lead him safely home
To the old familiar caravan and ways he used to roam,
And bring him as it brought his sires from their far first abode
To where the gipsy camp-fires burn along the Portsmouth Road.

C. F. S.

* * * * *

"The Premier's principal speech was made in St. Andrew's Hall,
where he was presented with the Freedam of the
City."--_Liverpool Post and Mercury._

Which he promptly passed on to the enemy.

* * * * *

"Skilled non-workers all over the Union have for some time been
in great demand, and enough of them are not available at the
present time."--_Rand Daily Mail_.

There are still a few that the old country could spare.