'M. Castille, a chemist who has his shop in the Ternes. district of Paris, is a worthy descendant of the Frenchmen who revolted agains tyranny and stormed the Bastille. He, too, complains of oppression, and his' weapons are intellectual rather than material. Two years ago, it poli ing rest to workers, that. was decreed, in pursuance of the
shops in Paris should be closed on Sundays, the chemists in each quarter being left free to arrange among themselves as to which of them should remain on duty to supply drugs in cases of emergency. M. Castille alone refused to obey. He pointed out that Sunday was his hest trading day, that his rent and taxes continued to run, on Sundays and week-days alike, and that, s0 long as he did not compel duy employees to work for him on Sunday, he was entitled to use his shop for the purpose for which he rented it. He therefore defied the law and went on selling drags and patent medicines on Sundays as before. He was summoned 131 times and fined thousands of francs.
He has now invoked the of the great modern god, Publicity Last cance of Geneva—even Geneva with all its shorteomings—they will see 'a new light on their own problem.
is still too early to expect the League to enter the Chinese stage: the fever of revolution must pass its climax, and the Chinese must learn the lesson of their own disorder, before China can take her new course. But the time will come when, with civil war ending in oxhaustion, with the unity of China approaching realization, benevolent aid from an external source will be urgently needed. Is is chimerical to believe that it will be sought by the Chinese themselves? If and when the request is made—it may be years hence, it may be sooner—the Treaty Powers will have to Jeave interests, privileges, conses-sions, all, in the hands of the League, in the belief that only thus can Chinese sovereignty and the interests of the world at large be finally reconciled. The task will be greater than any that the League has yet undertaken, but its magnitude is no cause for timidity, hut rather a challenge to effort—"The Times."
Sunday week, he sold newspapers
pam., the hour after which he could not be summoned. His windows were plastered with summonses and also with posters. announcing his shop as a "fruiterie de premiere elass"—an allusion.to the French practice of always describing a drugstore as a "pharmacic de premiere classe" (no one ever seen a second-class " "p/ macie")._ The Chemists' Assistants. Union appealed in lofty terms to the great body of wage-earners to come and "demonstrate," but could not collect more than twenty or thirty supporters. In the intervals of selling oranges, M. Castille stood in-his doorway to be photographed, and beamed upon the crowd, which seemed to sympathise with him, Parisians are always on the side of anyone who pulls the leg of authority.
Expensive Nerves Henry Bernstein, the dramatist, has a horror of noise. His ideas refuse to flow when sound-waves imbinge upon his nerves. He therefore asked the landlord of the Paris house in which he occupies a flat to let him make his study sound-proof. The owner agreed, on condition that M. Bernstein paid all the cost and employed the landlord's architect instead of his own. Double walls were built round the study and space between them was filled with pulverized cork. Then M. Bernstein, fall of hope, sat down to work in hi sound-proof den and immediately heard someone sneeze in the next room! He fled with his secretaries to Areachon and engaged five rooms—one in which he worked, one above, another below and one on each side.
The bill for the sound-proof study. that proved such an utter failure was Frs. 40,000, and the escape to Areachon, the hire.of the five rooms and contingent expenses ran away with Prs, 108,000, so that M. Bernstein's scarch'for silence made him Frs. 148,000 out of pocket. He counter-claimed against the architect and contractor and also against his own architect and contractor for failing to detect the weak spots in French architects' and bills always contain numerous items in which the cost is reckoned down to the last centime, with an elaborate accuracy which the ordinary citizen is apt to regard as camouflage intended to disguise the horror of the total. In this ease, the court went carefully through the account, struck out numerous items and awarded M. Bernstein compensation to the amount of pre= cisely Frs. 31,707 as a set-off against the Frs. 40,000.
English as She is Taught An Englishman dining at a small Montmartre restaurant the other evening found himself next to a young man and a young. woman who faced each other across the table and talked English Inbouriously a strong French accent. Pain was imprinted on their features as they wrestled with the unfamiliar idiom. "Vot ces cet," inquired the young man, as he tendered the menu, to his companion, "zat you go to cat?" The lady scanned the sheet and replied without enthusiasm:—"I sink I will eat a beetle veal." They continued to exchange remarks from which all Gallic gaiety was banished, and the listener wondered why they found it necessary to dine together at all.
The secret came out when the young man, having paid the bill, handed a few five-frane notes to his companion and, breaking into French, with a sigh of relief, thanked her very much for the English lesson she had given him and asked when he could have another. The lady, reverting to the language of France with equal delight, made an appointment for the following week at the same place. She was one of many language-teachers who suaded their pupils of the st ity, of object-lessons over uninspiring struggles with books and dietion-In the same way, when an man and a Frenchman make an arrangement to exchange lessons, they seldom stay indoors. The: streets, restaurants and cafes offer an inexhaustible supply of subjects for conversation. In the same order of ideas, London dance teachers advertise that they are prepared to to private dances with their pupils as partners, This is a practical age.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.