_
We hope that in the case of certain restaurants the bark will not be so bad
as the bite.
* * * * *
[Illustration: _Mabel_ (_who has something in her eye_). "IT'S STILL VERY
SORE, MUMMY. SHALL I GARGLE IT?"]
* * * * *
THE DEAD TREE.
(_Being a terrible result of reading too much poetry in the modern
manner._)
Slushy is the highway between the unspeakable hedges;
I pause
Irresolute under a telegraph-pole,
The fourteenth telegraph-pole on the way
From Shere to Havering,
The twenty-first
From Havering to Shere.
Crimson is the western sky; upright it stands,
The solitary pole,
Sombre and terrible,
Splitting the dying sun
Into two semi-circular halves.
I do not think I have seen, not even in Vorticist pictures,
Anything so solitary,
So absolutely nude;
Yet this was an item once in the uninteresting forest,
With branches sticking out of it, and crude green leaves
And resinous sap,
And underneath it a litter of pine spindles
And ants;
Birds fretted in the boughs and bees were busy in it,
Squirrels ran noisily up it;
Now it is naked and dead,
Delightfully naked
And beautifully dead.
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