LITERARY NOTES

Evening Post, Volume CXIII, Issue 48, 26 February 1927, Page 21

LITERARY NOTES

Mr. Francis Eennell Eodd has something interesting to say on the patience of the Tuareg tribes of North Africa. In his "People of the Veil" (Maemillans), he writes: "The two most noticeable virtues among the Tuareg —that of patience and a sense of honour —have not come to them from Islam. They are attributable to something older. Their patience is not that of quietism or of fatalism. It is rather the faculty of being content to seek in the morrow what has been denied in the present. They take tho long view of life, and are not querulous; they are of the optimistic school of thought. Theirs has seemed to me'the patience of the philosopher, and not tho sulky resignation of a believer in pre-ordained things."

General Waters, in his recently published "Secret and Confidential," tella of an experience in 1892 when as an officer of the Intelligence Service he was sent to collect six copies of a very secret report (the only copies in existence) on the feasibility of an attack on the Dardanelles. Mr. Stanhope, at the War Office, was already packing up his papers "because the Government knew they would shortly afterwards be turned out of office," .and the report could not be found. When Lord Salisbury was asked for his copy he said he had some dim recollection of having seen it, and rather thought he had left it in the pocket of an old coat which he had given to a gardener. In all there were four of the six copies which were never traced or accounted for.

Sir William Nott-Bower, Commissioner of the City of London Police, has many amusing tales to tell in his "3Pifty-two Years a Policeman" (Arnold). One is connected with election to the Court of Common Council. All the candidates for the vacant Commissionership had to sit on the dais whilst the open voting was in progress, and the candidate next to whom he was sitting exclaimed to him as he heard the figures: "I never expected to win, and I really think you ought to, but I never knew before how many damned liars there are in the Court of Common v ouncil. I had double the number of promises that I have-votes." One other matter. The City Commissioner is, of course, an authority upon traffic, and his remarks on the time-honoured custom of "keeping to the right" (for pedestrians) are interesting. He will not listen to the strong. advocates of "keep to the left," and he gives this cogent reason: "I speak feelingly, for I myself on one of the occasions on -which I departed from my almost invariable Tule of keeping to the right, was knocked down, by; a motor."