DOING HER BIT.
Lady (about to purchase military headgear, to her husband). "I know it's more expensive than the others, dear, but—well, you see, you're too old to enlist, and I really feel we ought to do something!"
BY THE SEA.
"Jolly good luck," Miss Vesta Tilley used to sing, "to the girl who loves a soldier!" The sentiment is not less true to-day than when, too long ago, the famous male impersonator first uttered it. But there is no need to be actually the warrior's lover. To be his companion merely on a walk is to reap benefits, too, as I have been observing on the promenade of ——— (a marine town whose name is, for tactical reasons, suppressed). At ——— the girls whose good fortune it is to have for an acquaintance a lieutenant or captain have just now a great time, for the town has suddenly become a veritable Chatham, and the promenade is also a Champ de Mars. All the week it is the scene of military evolutions, a thought too strenuous for the particular variety of jolly good luck of which I am thinking; but there's a day which comes betwixt the Saturday and Monday when hard work gives way to rest, and then———!
For then this promenade, two or three miles long, is thronged by the military—privates, usually in little bands of threes and fours, and officers, mostly accompanied by pretty girls. And the demeanour of some of the younger of these officers is a great deal better worth watching than the sullen winter sea or the other more ordinary objects of the seaside. For they are there, some of them (bless their hearts!), for the pleasure of being saluted, and their pretty friends enjoy the reflected glory too. Some high-spirited ones among the satellites even go so far as noticeably to count the salutes which a walk yields. And I daresay they pit their bag against those of others. Their heroes probably vote such a competition bad form, and yet I doubt if they are really deeply resentful, and I guess that the young Roberts and the young Wolseley and the young Wellington all passed through similar ecstasies when they were first gazetted.
It was while walking behind one such happy little group that I made the discovery—a discovery to me, who am hopelessly a civilian, but no new thing I daresay to most people—that the saluting soldier must employ the hand which is farthest away from the officer whom he is saluting, and that is why some use the right and some the left—a discrepancy which plunged me into the gravest fears as to Lord Kitchener's fitness to control our army, until I realised the method underlying.
I noticed too that there is a good deal of difference both in saluting and in acknowledging salutes, and I overheard the fair young friend of one lieutenant adjuring him to be a little more genial in his attitude to the nice men who were bringing their arms and hands up with such whipcord tenseness in his honour.
"On another occasion one of our officers was pursued by an albatross which succeeded in crossing our lines."
Victoria Daily Colonist.
Joy of the Ancient Mariner on hearing that his King and Country want him.
