Pat (one of a raiding party returning under heavy fire). "COME ON, TIM. PHWAT FOR ARE YE SHTANDIN' THERE?" Tim. "I'M JUST WAITIN' TILL THE LITTLE SHTORM IS OVER. IF YEZ SHTAND STILL YE 'LL ONLY GIT WHAT'S FALLIN' IN THE WAN PLACE; BUT IF YE 'LL BE RUNNIN' ABOUT THE DIVIL KNOWS PWHAT YE MIGHT MEET IN WITH!" SCIENCE. "Francesca," I said, "they are talking about education again." "I didn't know," she said, "that they had ever stopped. They've been going on ever since I can remember." "Well," I said, "perhaps you are right; but sometimes they talk louder than they do at other times, and this time they" "That," she said, "is an impossible sentence. I really can't allow it to continue." "It's a cruel thing," I said, "to cut off a sentence in its prime." "It was such a poor sentence," said Francesca. "But poverty in a sentence is no crime any more than it is in a man. Besides, you didn't let it finish. It might have redeemed itself by its last words." No," she said, "those sort of sentences never do." "Francesca," I said, as a speaker of pure and perfect English you really take the bisc-- ahem-I mean the first prize." "Oh dear," she said, "what have I done now?" "You have talked execrable grammar," I said; "and it's all the worse for you, because they pretended to teach English grammar to girls-in fact, they still pretend to; whereas if I had said such an awful thing it wouldn't have mattered." "Why not?" them very badly. The consequence is they've never had any success in the world, and all the places they might have filled at huge salaries have been taken from them by men who have learnt chemistry and botany, and conchology and all the other ologies. In future everybody's got to learn everything that isn't Latin or Greek, and then we shall all be able to boast about our splendid training in Science." "But you," she said, "won't be able to boast much, will you? You'll be rather left out in the cold." 46 "They shan't put me there without a struggle," I said. When they accuse me of Latin Elegiacs or Greek Iambics, or try to make me responsible for the moods and tenses in a passage of indirect narration, I shall plead in my defence that I used to do some pretty tricks in electricity with a glass cylinder and a sheet of silk and that I once got a prize for dried flowers." "You won't be let off," she said, " and you won't deserve to be." I know the Great Bear all right," I said. "And chemistry," she said. "Can you tell me," I said, "why a chemist sometimes calls himself a chymist? Is a chymist a sort of aristocrat among chemists, or what else does the y imply?" "That," she said, "is not at all the chemistry you'll have to learn about." "Because it's well known that men of my generation never were taught English grammar. They only learnt Latin and Greek, and, according to all accounts, they learnt | 'I know," I said; "it'll be something which involves a A CHANCE SPECIMEN OF THE RARE "CAMBERWELL BEAUTY" BUTTERFLY AROUSES THE COLLECTOR'S PASSION IN PRIVATE BLOGGSON, LATE ASSISTANT ENTOMOLOGIST AT A FAMOUS UNIVERSITY MUSEUM. Hurrah!" she cried. Frederick a scientific man. Don't stand there gaping. immediately." "Let's begin at once making "We'll suggest it to him," she said. R. C. L. Another Impending Apology? "Mr. Redmond's speech was a model of good sense and good feeling. . . . Mr. Redmond's speech was quite exceptional in tone." Parliamentary Correspondent of" Westminster Gazette." "No," I said, "I will not fetch him. I shouldn't know what to do with him when I had got him. Besides, when "In another case a passenger was saved from injury, and possibly I last saw him half an hour ago he was engaged in a the platform and footboard."-Sunday Paper. loss of life, by alighting from a train in motion and falling between scientific pursuit. Silkworms are science, aren't they?" "Yes," she said, "I suppose they are in a sort of way." "Well," I said, "he was busy with his silkworms. It was supposed that Front-de-Boeuf was about to begin to spin himself in." Unless you are an acrobat, however, the ordinary method of alighting is safer still. "Professor H. S. Foxwell, lecturing on 'The Finance of the War' at the Royal Institution, said that there were large boards in India and he could not understand why we had not tried to tap them for war purposes."-Rangoon Times. Mr. MCKENNA is already described by some people as a cormorant. Is he now to be a woodpecker as well? AT THE PLAY. "THE SISTER-IN-LAW." FOR most of us the problem of the deceased wife's sister never had any but an academic interest, and even that has passed with the Edwardian age. But there remains, and must ever remain, the far more poignant problem of the living wife's sister. And now that mothers-in-law as a theme for easy ribaldry have become discredited, British drama, ever seeking for new fountains of inspiration, has discovered the sister-in-law. She has this advantage, that whereas there can never be more than two mothers-in-law in any ménage, there is practically no limit (within nature and reason) to the number of possible sisters-in-law. our first chance of amusing ourselves; THE FUTURE OF BOOKS. THE interesting symposium recently published in The Weekly Dispatch on the future of the book-world had only one drawback. It was not complete, and Mr. Punch is glad to be able to remedy this defect by adding the views Mr. HALLWARD calls his play a light of some leading publishers who were comedy. I will not quarrel with his unaccountably omitted from the record. epithet, though what is light to him Sir John Odder, Bart., of the firm of may be heavy to me, but I must Odder and Odder, declines to prophesy, make one more protest against the justifying himself by the refusal of the employment, in a comedy, of the license Grand Duke NICHOLAS to indulge in. of farce. In a farce nobody has any prognostications, but he is certain that right to object if a character enters upon the shilling novel has come to stay. a full stage and turns detached somer-"People no longer buy books singly, saults without considering their ethical but in handfuls. They are They are indisrelationship to the other characters or pensable not merely as mental pabto the matter in hand. In a comedy ulum but as upholstery. Look at the one resents this behaviour. Yet that, number of shelves in bedrooms nowain effect, is what Mr. HALLWARD per- days as compared with twenty years mits in his characters. Somebody ago, and remember that, as some poet comes on and takes the stage to him- remarks somewhere, 'Shelves without self for his own purpose, leaving the books are like kitchens without cooks.' rest of the figures in an equipoise of suspended animation. Among them may be the wife from whom he has been severed for months, but he is not to be From the very moment of the Bawtreys' put out of his stride by that or any return from their honeymoon-indeed other distraction. Even in a light Mrs. Bawtrey would have welcomed comedy the disregard of probabilities her at an even earlier stage-Dolly in small things may be just as annoying Marston, her sister, had planted her as any defiance, in a serious play, of self upon this pair, and ruled the do- the larger laws of human nature. mestic hearth. Two years had already elapsed, and it was only the intervention of Bawtrey's sister that forced him to recognise that it was time for Dolly to go. Strongly supported by her sister, she declines to move, and Bawtrey's only way to freedom is to push her into a marriage with Lawrence Hill, stockbroker. At the same time he has the misfortune (though I personally did not regard it as such) to quarrel with his wife, who goes off to stay indefinitely with the newly-married Dolly. Mr. CYRIL HALLWARD, however, does not exercise his full option. Though each of his female characters (I except the parlour-maid, about whose family relations we were left in ignorance) is a sister-in-law, they only total three. I think he ought to have had more, for some of us got rather tired before the end and wanted a change. An excellent cast, including Miss MARIE ILLINGTON, Mr. NIGEL PLAYFAIR, Mr. SAM SOTHERN, Miss CHRISTINE SILVER and Mr. HIGNETT (the applause accorded to Mr. HIGNETT on his first entry was a tribute rarely accorded to a man-servant),' made the most of a rather undistinguished play. Miss MARY O'FARRELL, who was the original sister-in-law, showed well when she was angry, but was not very effective with the lighter side of her part. Certainly she failed to convey to me the piquancy which she herself appeared to discover in it. We have now, at the Hills', an almost perfect replica of the first state of things -a sister-in-law firmly established in a I should like to think that it was my household where she is not wanted by fault, and that The Sister-in-Law found the husband. There might have been me in an unappreciative mood. At the a pleasant irony in this if it had satis- close the general verdict of the audience fied (as far as comedy may) the con- was favourable to her. Let us hope ditions of Greek tragedy-if, that is to they were right and that she is in for say, the stockbroker had in some way a long run, if that is a kind wish for been responsible for the original ar- her. I myself should not like to run rangement à trois, and was now, in very far in this weather. his own case, paying the penalty that best fitted his offence. Unhappily the author was innocent of any such design. O. S. Putting off the Evil Day. To be candid, his own scheme was not handled as well as it might have been, and though it had its very pleas"COOK General and Housemaid Waitress ant spasms of fun it never achieved Wanted, for elderly lady and son: son called the boisterous gaiety which excuses a up: happy home."-Provincial Paper. lack of technique. We suffered a good We do not like this sinister suggestion deal of tedious repetition before we got of past strife. Mr. Thicker, of the house of Thicker and Steep, expresses a fervent hope that the anæmic six-shilling novel will die, and that its place will be taken by the cheap robust novel, "full of the red corpuscles of realism." He is of opinion that the circulating libraries have been the great stumbling-block in the way of strong and live literature. Mr. Blessing declares that the shilling novel is the greatest boon to humanity since the days of CAXTON. "The shocker' is only the logical corollary of shock-tactics in war, and is absolutely indispensable as a means of counteracting the lethargy of a sophisticated generation." Mr. Blessing notes as an interesting fact that one of the twenty-seven variants in the spelling of SHAKSPEARE'S name is "Shockspear." Per contra Mr. Goethemann thinks that the shilling novel has not come to stay, because he anticipates that the Government will find it necessary to lay an embargo on it, as on cocaine, because of its demoralising and disintegrating influence. In fine, he thinks it not improbable that the old 31s. 6d. three-volume novel will be reintroduced with a statutory sanction, the price to be net, in order to prevent the dissemination of cheap literary garbage. Mr. Cuthbert Simpson thinks that the shilling is not the enemy but the ally of the six shilling novel, since the result of a too prolonged immersion in sensational fiction is to promote an inevitable reaction towards sobriety. Besides, novelists cannot live on the profits of shilling books. Even publishers, Mr. Simpson added in a moment of heroic expansion, find it difficult, and he himself has sold twenty million copies of The Young Blood's Library. The Captain. "YOUR BROTHER IS DOING SPLENDIDLY IN THE BATTALION. BEFORE LONG HE'LL BE OUR BEST MAN." OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.. were written. If no Bosches had broken loose over Europe the Doctor could have written love-letters which would have fluttered the feminine world. But, as it is, his mingling of Love with War will please countless people who cannot face an undiluted draught of either. (By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.) Uncensored Letters from the Dardanelles (HEINEMANN), written by a French Doctor and translated by his English wife, has not been too happily named, for part of this correspondence, and not by any means the least interesting, It is possible that, if you share my own most pleasant was written after the author had left Gallipoli for Serbia. recollections of Mrs. Barnet-Robes, and The Hat Shop, But one cannot quarrel with the title of so absorbing you may agree with me that in A Mrs. Jones (LANE) that a book. Time after time, in most revealing flashes, the clever writer, Mrs. C. S. PEEL, has done herself something writer brings before our eyes the insuperable difficulties less than justice. It is not that the book lacks humour or which the Allies had to face; but, although the story of these character or charm; it abounds in them all; but somehow heroic ventures is pathetic enough, we are saved here from these gifts never seem to come by their due effect. Perhaps. any depression by a wonderfully infectious spirit of cheer- the reason of this is the absence of form in the story. fulness and courage. The tighter the place the more our Mrs. PEEL appears to have become a convert to the theory Doctor (he will forgive the proprietary epithet) braced that if you conduct a central character from infancy to himself to deal with it. Fortunately, like most brave men, middle-age you have done all that is required to make a he is also modest; but, from the mere facts which he tells novel. Nothing very much happens to Dorothy, her prewithout laying any stress on them, it is impossible not to sent protagonist, though the reader is kept in a constant think of him as a very capable person. He gives us not expectation of events on the next page. After being wooed only a clear account of determined fighting against over- by various more-or-less romantic suitors, she marries a whelming odds, but a very distinct and vivid impression that nothing can ever break or beat an army which has stood the supremest of tests and still retained its moral. It is a gallant book, not only in its pictures of the War, but also in its attitude towards the lady to whom these letters placid man named Jones, and bears him a daughter in whom placidity degenerates into vacuity. Towards the dangerous age of forty poor Mrs. Jones gets so deadly bored with the pair of them that she sets off alone for the other side of the world. Here for a moment romance touches her, but having got it over she returns calmed to discussed question of games is absolutely sound, and to a the life of domestic affluence. Not much of a story; but certain extent he appreciates the changes which War has fortunately this is the least part of the book. The best of brought about in the thoughts and ambitions of publicit are the chapters in which financial stringency drives school boys. That a man who has such strong opinions Mrs. Jones into supporting the family income by journalism and also the courage of them should be attacked in his turn on a ladies' paper. And there are many happy touches, is only to be expected, but when opponents talk of his such as Dorothy's very human outburst against her placid "upsetting, irrational, nonsensical notions," he could quite husband for not getting angry at bad food. Clearly easily afford to smile instead of being at times "dispirited," Mrs. PEEL appreciates the drawbacks of living with the as he tells us he is. equably-tempered. I hope next time that she will put her good things into a more artistic setting. One does not want to discourage versatility and experimentalisation in authors; but it is a question whether their attempts at new departures should necessarily find their way into print. Artists (at any rate most artists: I except in this connection Mr. AUGUSTUS JOHN) do not hang all their sketches, so why should authors publish all their tentative Very few novelists succeed nowadays in evading the War, but were it not for her dedication Miss KATE HORN, in Love's Law (STANLEY PAUL), would be of their slender company. Her story is of a young woman possessed of two qualities that are meat and drink to traffickers in fiction, (a) beauty efforts? These remarks occur to me after reading The and (b) a determination to have nothing to do with marriage or men. Given such material the end is, of course, always in sight, and it is merely a matter of pages before the triumphant wooer-in this case the suave, tactful and middle-aged Major Dawne-wins his bride. There are en route some not very convincing pictures of a suburban pair of love-birds whose bliss is ruined (as it never would have been in real life) by the wife's instant readiness, after years of married trust and felicity, to believe the first anonymous story of her husband's infidelity; and the author's later draft upon the bank of melodrama to discredit her heroine is not much better. That a writer with Miss HORN's gift for making direct transcripts from life should dip into the reservoir of cliches at all is a mystery. But she is evidently more fond of convention, even when it is hollow, RICARDO than originality, or she would have also resisted the temptation, which now besets every Captain's Furniture (MILLS AND BOON), by JOHN TREVENA. Hitherto Mr. TREVENA has been known to me as the writer of stern and uncompromising novels of a dour and passionate peasantry. One of these was called Furze the Cruel, and another Granite, and they indicated (as has indeed been done before) what fierce emotions can smoulder beneath the simple exteriors of the dwellers in Devon. But in The Captain's Furniture, where Devon is still the background, there is nothing but farce, and farce long drawn out and, alas! not funny. There is hardly a creature in the book in whom one can believe, which of course matters nothing in a farce so long as we are bustled into laughter, but matters very much if (as in the present case) we are not. It is not every day that you can watch folk-lore in the making. Yet that was the agreeable feeling that I derived from a little volume written by Mr. young novelist, to lay some of her scenes in Cornwall, a NORMAN DOUGLAS, under the title of London Street Games sadly overworked county. (ST. CATHERINE'S PRESS). Perhaps you know already Mr. DOUGLAS'S gift of racy humour, as shown in his Italian Mr. S. P. B. MAIS is a tilter, and in the sketches of which journey-books. This time he has wandered no further than A Public School in War-Time (MURRAY) is comprised, he the pavements of various London districts, watching the delivers many a hefty thrust, and has, I should guess, children at play there, and noting down I could not count thoroughly enjoyed his bout. While sympathising with how many different games. The result is interesting, his aims, especially where he urges the cultivation of a taste amusing, and at times not a little pathetic-though perhaps for good literature in boys, I cannot repose a complete con- this last feeling is an unjustified sentimentalism, since fidence in him. On page 66 he writes, "Boys are born actors; children at play, whether among lamp-posts or orchards, let them act, encourage them at all times to act; boys are always in their proper kingdom. More genuinely sad have a far-finer imagination than most adults." Agreeing is the conclusion to which Mr. DOUGLAS's observations cordially with this sentiment, it was a shock to me to find, have led him, that modern conditions, and especially the a few pages later, "Remember, please, boys have no imagin- ubiquitous flicker-palace, are tending to destroy in London ation." What does Mr. MAIS really mean? If a boy has children the power of imagination by which these street no imagination and yet a far finer one than most adults, games have been evolved. Therefore he hastens to take where do the unfortunate majority of us come in? I can- note of them for future historians. This is a grim saying. not help resenting this confusion, because it has shaken my But one may at least be glad that some of the only gold faith in the tilter, if not in the tilt. Still, much can be for- with which London streets were ever paved, the makegiven to such an enthusiast as Mr. MAIS. He shows here believe of childhood, has been stored so sympathetically, if a real affection for boys; his attitude towards the much only for a museum. |