CHARIVARIA.

Punch, March 5, 1913

 

That a Suffragette’s proposal to enter a cage containing three lions, and while there to address an audience on Woman’s Suffrage, should have been forbidden is not surprising. The curious point is that no protest came from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

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Whoever is looking after the war in the Near East appears to be very careless. Several battles have had to be put off owing to falls of snow, but the simple precaution of covering the ground with straw has not yet been taken.

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A domestic servant at Berwick has just woken up after a sleep of six days. One of these cheap alarum-clocks, we presume.

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The lunatic who recently posed as a magistrate took his seat, we are told, on the bench, and, when applicants came before him, “listened to them gravely.” It was this slip which first aroused suspicion.

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A striking confirmation of Sir Edward Carson’s dictum, “Ulster will Fight,” was given at a recent boxing contest at Belfast, where the spectators not only knocked down the winner of the competition and poured buckets of water over him, but also severely damaged a perfectly good referee.

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Inspector Arnold, after spending forty-nine years underground, is now coming up to live on a pension. “I don’t know what I shall do,” he says, “when I have to spend all day out on top. Give me smoke and smell.” Londoners are justly incensed at the suggestion that these luxuries can only be obtained underground.

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Their civic pride is, however, soothed by the announcement of a French airman that, passing over London a thousand feet up, he knew where he was by the unpleasant smell.

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Little by little the gaps in the world’s knowledge are being filled up. Mr. T. Sedgley, through the medium of The Express, states that he has found out that wasps can sting in February.

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Born near Bridgnorth in the early part of last Summer, a number of tadpoles have not yet become frogs; and a highly respected zoologist informs us that the retardation is due to insufficient food. What tadpoles hope to gain by these foolish hunger-strikes we cannot understand.

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The New York authorities confirm ex-President Castro’s statement that he has left America “merely for pleasure”—his own and theirs.

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It has been discovered that nearly all itinerant German musicians come from the villages of Wolfstein and Yettenbach, on the Rhine. We fear that the mawkish sentimentality of the public will prevent any arrangement being made for exterminating their instruments at one concerted swoop when they are all at home practising; but we confess that we toy wistfully with the idea.

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What Buttermilk Is. According to an evening paper, “buttermilk is the backbone of Ireland.” This explains a good deal.

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In the cloistered seclusion of Windsor, the headmaster of Eton has allowed himself to get a little behind the times. “The golf-course,” he says, “is an admirable corrective of nervous tension. There is no unrest there.” Clifford’s Inn hums like a hive at the slight cast upon its activities.

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Just as we thought we had solved the problem of the tasteful yet inexpensive wedding-present, we are stunned by the information, in a daily paper, that the price of pythons has gone up £1 a foot.

 

 

                               

 

Unsigned column as printed; credited to P. G. Wodehouse in the Index to Vol. 144 of Punch. Wodehouse wrote seven columns in early 1913, taking over temporarily from Walter Emanuel, the longtime author of the “Charivaria” column.