A young man was nearly strangled in the Exhibition the other day by a fat lady: one of those beings whose membership of the fair sex seems to be due to a fit of abstraction on the part of Dame Nature. The lady in question, tall, strong, and unmistakeable moustache, was" walking between the Champ de Mars and the Trocadero. The young man, a lawyer's clerk and amateur photographer, pointed his camera at the dame. Instead of being flattered, she was wroth. She jumped to the conclusion that her ugliness alone had attracted the man's attention. She raised her umbrella and battered him on the head with this, she seized the youth by the throat and held him as in a vice. He was at the last gasp when a policeman arrived and rescued him. At the station it was explained to the fat lady that there is no law to prevent the taking of snap-shots in the Exhibition grounds.' Nevertheless, she was quite right in assuming that her ugliness alone had attracted the kodaker's attention. He is not a frivolous idealist but a collector of specimens of human hide-onsness. He walks about the Exhibition grounds with his camera and secures imperishable records of all the feminine hor-Tors he encounters. In this way ho has already formed a collection of nearly six hundred portraits: an important contri, bution to contemporary teratology. Iu.di viously circulated, these photographs would serve as a valuable antidote, to the passions excited by troubadorian traditions. But fat ladies with moustache are often absurdly sensitive about their looks,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.