Volume 146 — HOW TO IMPROVE LONDON.

We were discussing London's needs. Each of us was suggesting some long-felt want which most appealed to him or her.

Some had declared that what London chiefly wanted was a tube from Victoria to Chelsea. Someone else said that what it chiefly wanted was a glass roof over Bond Street and the chief shopping area. Someone else said that what it chiefly wanted was perforated pavements to let the rain through at once—and so on.

"What I want," said a pretty girl—so pretty that I almost got up and set about providing her with it—"is a guide to the cinemas. I adore cinemas, but there is no means of knowing what is on unless you go to the place itself. Then very likely it's some stupid long play, with more printed descriptions than deeds and more letters to read than people to see. Now there ought to be a list of all the cinema programmes on sale at the bookstalls, like The Times and Spectator."

"Wouldn't you have a cinema critic too," someone asked, "like Mr. Walkley, to say how the films amused him, and so on?"

"No, I don't want that," she said. "But I should like information as to how long they were, and if they were American or Italian or French or English, and I should like a star to be put against those which Mr. Redford had not thought splendid."

When it came to my turn I said that London's most crying need was a tailors' clearing-house.

"What on earth is that?" they asked.

"Well," I said, "I'll tell you. All men have tailors, and for the most part they stick to them, because they find them all right, or fear to go further afield to begin all over again. But every now and then it happens, no matter how good the tailor, that a coat is stubborn. It goes on being wrong. Fitting after fitting leaves it even worse than before; and the result is that one either loses one's temper and bangs out of the place and never enters it again, or, not wishing to hurt the tailor's feelings, one accepts defeat and gives the coat away the next day at considerable personal loss. In other words, a time comes when one either cannot, through disgust, bring oneself to visit one's tailor again on that matter, or when one cannot, through sympathy, bring oneself to ask him to do any more. Don't you know that?"

They agreed.

"Very well then. This is where the clearing-house comes in. The tailor there is prepared to tackle such cases as those I have described. He will come to the coat with an open mind and put it right. You can ask him, without any false delicacy, to do so because it is his business. That's what London most needs," I concluded.

"I daresay you're right," said another of the party; "but in my opinion what London most needs is a good restaurant which has pork-pie on its bill of fare."

THE MILITANT SCANDAL.

I.—The Sex pays the Penalty.

Algernon (suddenly to his aunt and cousin). "Look here, I hope you both understand that when we get to the Academy I don't know you. I can't be seen there with women after this Sargent business!"

"An extraordinary amount of destruction and annoyance is annually perpetrated by the somewhat unsociable creatures known as wasps."—Amateur Gardening.

They are still more annoying when they are sociable.

"Masterman jumped out of the conveyance, which also contained several ladies, and, overtaking the animals, succeeded in turning them into a telegraph pole."

Lincolnshire Echo.

This trick is a favourite one with all good conjurers, but rarely comes in so opportunely. The second part of it—in which the telegraph pole is turned into a couple of rabbits—is rather in the nature of an anti-climax.

The Pall Mall Gazette on John Burns:—

"Johannes locutur est; res finite est. Or so we hope."

We, too, always hoped at school, and then wished afterwards we had looked it up in our Latin Grammar.

THE MILITANT SCANDAL.

II.—The skied artist comes into his own.