The Day of Unrest.

Saturday is the “fixer's” big day (no, sir! handy men never play golf; they would rather stay home and “fix” golf clubs). In the suburbs you hear him with hammer and saw and axe and wrench adding a few more grey hairs to his wife's permanent wave.

How many brave feminine hearts miss a beat—even a whole octave—at the sound of those sinister syllables. “I'll fix it”? How many of the nearest and drearest of the fecund “fixer” wish that their husbands were just ordinary lazy dull duds like you and me? But the actual destruction and annihilation is not all. There is the weekly hunt for the fixer's tools, to add bitterness to the aloes in the cannubial cup of the “fixer's” bitter half.

As the Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold, so sounds the horrid cry of the maddened fixer.

“Where's that saw?” “Who's had the pincers?” “Find the axe!” Little children fly whimpering to their mother's skirts; the cat takes off for the rhododendrons; the dog moans beneath the wash tubs, the hair bristling on its neck; for the shadow of

“Rejuvenate the Grandfather Clock.”

page 23 guilt lies upon the household of the “fixer.”

The saw is found under the wood pile where Willie has been sharpening it on the crowbar. The coalman has deposited half a ton of Westport on the pincers. The axe! Well, who ever had an axe that could be found? Little Lancelot (being too young to realise that “we men must stick together”) divulges that Willie has been engaged in erecting a fort, somewhere in Noman's Land, to resist the Italian invader. On such slender evidence is Willie taken away to “another place,” and wild cries testify to dirty deeds “down under.”

Even a spot of plumbing is powerless to deter a real he-man fixer. (Fixers, anyway, are only plumbers who have been cheated by Fate out of their birthright—or wrong).