Humorous Artist. "I've brought you an original funny joke this time. A friend of mine thought of it."
Editor (after reading it). "Yes, it is funny; but I prefer the drawing that was published with it in the 'seventies!'"
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
Three numbers of The South Polar Times were brought out at Cape Evans, the winter quarters of Captain Scott, during 1911. Mr. Apsley Cherry-Garrard, the editor, has now presented them to a wider circle under the auspices of Smith, Elder, hoping that they will prove "a source of interest and pleasure to the friends of the expedition." He need have no fears. Of course a paper produced under such conditions is in its nature esoteric, and many of its jokes are lost if you "don't know Jimson." But if you have previously read Scott's Last Expedition then will will "know Jimson"; you will feel that every man at Cape Evans in 1911 was a personal friend of yours, and you will be delighted with this facsimile reproduction of the paper which delighted them. Personally I cannot read or see too much of the men who are my heroes; and in a world where an ordinary school-girl is allowed twenty-seven photographs of Mr. Lewis Waller I shall not consider myself surfeited with two caricatures and a humorous character-sketch of Lieutenant Bowers. But there are contributions to The South Polar Times which have an interest other than the merely personal. Mr. Griffith Taylor, a tower of strength on the literary side, is really funny in The Bipes—a paper (on the wingless bipeds of Cape Evans) supposed to have been read by Oates' escaped rabbit to the Royal Society of Rabbits. Mr. Taylor, as a recorder of history in Scott's Last Expedition, was, I thought, a little too famililar; in these and other articles he is much more at home. But it is upon Dr. Wilson's pictures (both serious and comic) that The South Polar Times can most justly pride itself. I envy Mr. Cherry-Garrard so prolific and brilliant a contributor. Still more I envy him (and all his colleagues at Cape Evans) the knowledge of such a man. The more I get to know of "Bill" Wilson, the more I understand that he was of the very salt of the earth—a man to love whom was indeed a liberal education, and to be loved by whom was a passport to the little company of the elect.
When John Barleycorn (Mills and Boon) came my way, I noticed that the publishers had shown a reticence, unusual in these days, on the outside paper cover; they didn't say a word as to the quality or character of the contents. They had three good reasons: first, given the name of Jack London, there was no need of further advertisement or lure; second, if they had started describing the book they would have been unable to say with strict truth that it was or was not a novel, for it isn't and it is; third, and best, they couldn't, as honest men, have avoided mentioning that it is in a way a sermon on alcoholism, and that, being said, might have acted as a deterrent, unless they had explained (as they wouldn't have had room to do) how and why, when they said "sermon," they didn't really mean "sermon." So they lay low and said nothing, and I almost wish I had done the same, for no one who has the lightest interest, practical or theoretical, in John Barleycorn ought to be put off these alcoholic memoirs. They diarist purports to have been first drunk at the age of five, again at the age of seven, almost perpetually for a spell of years from the age of fifteen, and yet to have taken over a quarter of a century to acquire a liking for alcohol. That sounds odd, but it is not unique. Not only in California and not only in the lower grades of society, is Youth, vigorous and unspoilt, bound to acquire the taste if it would foregather on lively and intimate terms with its fellows; and not only in the saloons of
