AN OLD TALE REVIVED.

Evening Post, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 126, 29 May 1915, Page 11

AN OLD TALE REVIVED.

♦ I General Hector Macdonald, after meeting disgrace in Ceylon, was supposed to die by his own hand in Paris — a shameful death for so gallant a soldier. Rumour, however, has always peT- j sisted that he still lives under another name, and he has been allegedly heard of in China, Russia, and Japan, occupying positions of honour and trust. The latest rumour brings his existence up to date, and assigns him the position of Russian generalissimo. That, at all events, is th© story told by a Toronto correspondent of an American magazine. "Major-General Sir Hector Macdonald is at the head of the Russian Army in tho present Euroean war. I have it direct from two widely different sources, and only wish I could at this mom©ftt give you my authority for the statement, but it would necessarily bring in the names of two officers high up in the English service. They recall the fact that General Kuropatkin was supposedly Hector Macdonald, and say he has been, and is now, at the head of the mobilisation staff in Russia, which possibly accounts for the surprisingly wonderful mobilisation the Russians have made." , When is somebody going to arise and say that, after all, Lord Roberts is not dead, but secretly managing the War Office '!

_ There's a good story going the rounds just now that shows how Austria was deprived of one of her fighting men. A visitor to a W-est End restaurant in London, being waited on by v particularly tall and fine-Jookings waiter, with a foreign accent, asked the man. his nationality. "Oh, I'm a Hungarian," was tho reply. "How comes it, then, that a big strong fellow like you is not on th© firing line?" asked the visitor. "Well, sir, it's like this," replied the knight of the napkin, puintiug to a brother waiter it. few tables off. "You see (hat jnan? Well, he's » Berb. »ml hat« vat y»u call fund."- j