dressing that vegetable, which in France has
since received the appropriate name of "petit
pain tout fait"—the ready-made loaf.

OFFICIAL FLAGS.

I HAD once the honour of belonging to a
branch of the famous Circumlocution-office.
Of course, that was when there was a Circumlocution-
office, and before administrative reform
and competitive examinations had brought our
public offices to that condition of alertness,
economy, and simplicity, for which they are now
so justly conspicuous. In those good old days,
we went to work at 10.15 A.M., did our little
business in our own very quiet and gentlemanly
little way, and at 4 P.M. washed our white
hands, and departed very little the worse for
our day's exertions. We had not passed a
very severe examination, and, being thus ignorant
of our own worth, jogged happily on, even
though promotion was not then the reward of
merit, and it was only by regular and fore-
ordained degrees that we mounted to the
few comfortable little places, with four figures
of salary, to which we looked forward, as we
drew our not very heavy quarterly pay. It was,
indeed, odd that with so little incentive to exertion
we ever got through our work at all, and
the little work we did, must have been badly
done. Our Branch had, in much haste, to
furnish to another Branch, a great many hundred
miles away, an immense number of things on
which their very lives depended, and, as these
necessary things were not forthcoming, the
death of an immense number of horses and
men was the consequence. Then, of course,
came the very proper question, "Whom shall
we hang?" You couldn't hang a Board. So,
as the whole failure was attributed to the slippery
distribution of responsibility amongst a
Board, the Board was abolished out of hand,
and, instead thereof, we were to have over all
the departments, one supreme head, who would
be responsible for all. The advantages of this
scheme were twofold. First, when anything
went wrong there was at once somebody to
hang; and, second, when he was hanged,
nobody missed him. So far so good. We had
got our suspendible chief, our go-to-prison
editor, our whipping-boy, and, of course, everything
must now go right; and this was the
right way in which everything accordingly
went.

It could not be expected that our whipping-
boy—created though he was for the express
purpose of being whipped—would have any taste for
avoidable castigation. Obviously he would keep
a sharp look-out after the departments under
him; and, when he was whipped, take excellent
care that the particular department which had
occasioned the operation, should not itself sit
down in comfort to rejoice over its own escape.
Nor did this subsidiary whipping lose anything
by being executed at second-hand. And it was
precisely upon this principle of the official mind
that the change had been made. It is wonderful
how effectual it has been in sharpening
our several faculties and teaching each to take
care that whatever blunder may be committed,
it shall not at any rate be traced home to him
—obviously the desired result.

A case in point: One fine summer morning,
some three or four years ago, Our Branch
received a "Demand" from the Quartermaster-
General's Department, Barbadoes, for certain
signal flags. It ran thus:

Flags,      Red .       .       .    12 ft. by 9 ft.    1
   „           Blue        .       .        â€ž     „     „       1
   „           Red, white cross      â€ž     „     „       1
   „           White, red     „          â€ž     „     „       1
Pendants red           .       .       „     „     „       1

Simple enough, you will say, for all I had to do
when the Head of my Room placed it in my
hands was to write to the Tower and order the
flags to be sent. Stop a moment! Here was
a wrong article demanded, and, if I passed the
order on, that wrong article might haply be
supplied; and haply there the blunder might
come to light, and our new Chief be therefore
hanged. In that case the chances were pretty
strong that, not only he who demanded the
wrong article, and he who supplied the same,
but poor intermediate I (through whom the order
came), would be somewhat unpleasantly haunted
by his ghost. The blunder was this: Our
Barbadian colleague had demanded

Pendants red   .     .       „     „     „     1

while, in fact, he wanted

Pendants red  —————————  1

You don't see the difference? Look again. Do
you see those three little pairs of dots? They
are the official symbol for a repetition of the
figures under which they stand, so that it stood
in extenso thus:

Pendants red  .      .     12 ft. by 9 ft.  1

But a Pendant cannot be "twelve feet by
nine feet." A Pendant is essentially a long narrow
strip of bunting. It has, like Euclid's line,
"length without breadth." Herein lay the
difficulty. Should I order a flag which could not
possibly be right, or should I change the order
to one which might—possibly—be wrong? In
either alternative suspension stared me in the face,
so I adopted a middle course, and laid the case
before the Head of my Room. But Mr. Norris,
like myself, had no fancy for being hanged.
Officially, he knew no more than I, the proper
description of this mysterious flag; and why
should he commit himself upon his private
belief or mine, that the pendant was in truth just
a narrow strip of bunting, value half-a-crown?
So, by his advice, I ascended to the uppermost
story to take counsel of Mr. Traverse, who, as
Head of the Military Branch, might be supposed
to understand the wants of Quartermaster-
Generals better, at all events, than
ourselves.

"Mr. Traverse, here is a demand from the
Q.M.G.'s Department, Barbadoes, for a red