Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 156, February 12, 1919

Excerpt

A LOVE TRAGEDY.

He was a smart new clinical thermometer. She was a pretty nurse in an influenza ward. His figurings were clear and his quicksilver glittered. Her eyes were blue and a little curl peeped from under her cap. He fell madly in love with her; and when her dainty fingers toyed with him his little heart swelled to bursting and he registered all he could.

So when she took her morning temperatures her patients were desperately high, and when the other nurse took them in the evening they were three degrees lower; and the doctors were much perplexed.

They put the love-struck thermometer in a tumbler of warm water with two others to test him; and, freed from her influence, he recorded correctly. Learned authorities on medical research meditated pamphlets, on the new variation of the universal plague.

Then came a morning when the pretty nurse, after too many cigarettes the night before, took her own temperature. For the adoring thermometer the supreme moment had arrived. In rapturous ecstasy at the touch of her dear lips he rose to heights of exaltation that left his other efforts far behind. "Drat the thing," exclaimed the pretty nurse, putting him down nastily, "I've got it myself now," and went off to bed. He, broken-hearted, rolled off the table and died.

"I remember," said a veteran of nineteen, "when there was a hansom at the stand at the corner."

"Oh, that's nothing," said a venerable spinster of twenty-one. "I've been, to dances with a female chaperon where there was no smoking on the stairs, and some people danced a thing they called a 'tango.'"

"When I was working on the land," resumed the first speaker, "I had a day off and went to lunch with people close by. The man who sat next me was a judge and asked me what an 'old bean' meant."

"Oh, cut it out!" interposed an aged matron who had not hitherto taken any part in the conversation. "When I was born there was no Daily Mail, when I went to school I was taught to play the piano with my fingers, and when I married people hadn't begun to 'jazz.'"

A NEW GAME OF BAWL.

"An open howling handicap will be held at Talleres, F.C.S., next Sunday."

Standard (Buenos Ayres).

"At a meeting of the newly-formed British and Allied Waiters', Chefs' and Employees' Union the president said that one of their main objects was to stop enemy aliens from spoiling their business. They must do this themselves."—Daily Paper.

And some of them, it must be admitted, have been making considerable efforts in this direction.

EDENTULOUS PERSONS.

It happened a long time ago. Higgins, Mackenzie and I, three irresponsible subalterns, had been lent to the Government of India for famine relief work. One Sunday we foregathered in the cool of the evening at a dak bungalow, near the point where our three districts met, to compare notes and to swap lies.

"How are you getting on?" I asked Higgins.

"I'm not getting on at all. I'm just stagnating. I do all my work and draw my pay, and there's the end of it. I'm sure the regiment has forgotten all about me, and in fact no one seems to be aware of my existence."

"Why not write to the Government of India about it?" remarked Mackenzie....