SCOTCH HUMOUR.
[To THE EDITOR OP THE " SPECTATOR."3 SIR,—That is a good story in your " Sensational Reformation " article in the Spectator of October 24th. As to the effort to terrorise a drunken patient into sobriety, I think I can supply an even better. I heard it in my youth where, as I believe, it happened. A little knot of townsmen were wont to prolong their drinking-bouts, and when there was no law closing public-houses at 11 p.m. in Scotland, these sederunts extended not seldom far on into the morning hours. To try and check the doings of the topers on one occasion, at the hour when the couple of candles had nearly expired (there was no gas in our town in those days), a spectre of human build, but robed in white, and carrying a lantern under the enveloping sheet so as to produce a diffused red light, stalked solemnly into the gloomy room, and stood in what was hoped would be a terror- striking silence. As gravely as if he rose to meet some mourner, one of the tipsy crew stood up on his feet. Forming a bubble of saliva on his lip, he poised it on the tip of his middle finger, and, projecting it towards the supposed emissary of terror in a way that most boys understand and occasionally practise when in vulgarest mood, the swaying drunkard shot the moisture hard at the glimmering sheet and figure, with the one remark, Scottice : " Ye're a gude while oot or ye'd have fizzed." There is no use adding that the little plot was a
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