25,000 lbs. of “Volunteer” plumcake. In addition to these, large quantities of wines, spirits, &c., were supplied to sutlers, messmen, and volunteers. On subsequent occasions, when, for reasons best known to themselves, the Rifle Association has provided its own commissariat, it has been discovered that the efforts of Spiers & Pond were by no means overpraised at the time, and that the laudatory notices received by the men who came from Australia to teach the mother country a profitable lesson were well deserved. Spiers & Pond have, it is true, met ample recognition from the press; yet now and again those gentlemen who consider it the whole duty of a journalist to sneer at everybody and everything have had their usual fling, and have written about pretentious eating-house keepers, forgetful of the fact that a dozen years or so ago they were crying their eyes out because the weary traveller in Great Britain could nowhere find the accommodation he was so anxious to pay for. We have been careful not to stray into the opposite extreme, though a long course of railway journeying under the old régime of mouldy pork-pies and stale Banbury cakes has made us feel very well disposed to a firm whose name has already passed into a proverb.
Some little interest was exhibited in the annexed, which appeared in the Times a few weeks back, and, according to the side espoused, looks like just indignation or brutal intolerance:—
SHOULD this meet the eye of the lady who got into the 12.30 train at New Cross Station on Friday, May 15, with two boys, one of whom was evidently just recovering from an illness, she may be pleased to learn that three of the four young ladies who were in the carriage are very ill with the measles, and the health of the fourth is far from what her relations could desire.
It has been quite the fashion to say