By P. G. Wodehouse, Author of 'The Little Nugget.'
Under this title Mr. Wodehouse has collected nineteen of the short stories written by him in the past four years. Mr. Wodehouse is one of the few English short-story writers with an equally large public on both sides of the Atlantic: but only two of these stories have an American setting. All except one of this collection are humorous, and some idea of the variety of incident of the remainder may be gathered from the fact that their heroes include a barber, a gardener, an artist, a playwriter, a tramp, a waiter, an hotel clerk, a golfer, a stockbroker, a butler, a bank clerk, an assistant master at a private school, an insurance clerk, a peer's son who is also a leading member of a First League Association football team, and a Knight of King Arthur's Round Table who is neither brave nor handsome.
SQUARE PEGS
By Charles Inge, Author of 'The Unknown Quantity.'
This novel raises again the absorbing question as to what is failure and what success. It tells how a big man from South Africa sets out to conquer London—the London of the Lobby and the Clubs—with a threepenny weekly paper and sympathy for the unemployed; how he fails, but in failure wins his woman; how she too suffers in the London of women workers. There is, on the other side, the little solicitor who calculates for and succeeds by the other's failure; but in succeeding loses. The background includes the life drama of an enthusiast for Labour reform.
MESSENGERS
By Margaret Hope, Author of 'Christina Holbrook.'
A story of the sudden yielding to temptation of a woman of good position. She suffers for her fault in prison, but her sufferings on release are ten times greater. She tries her utmost to keep the knowledge of her guilt from her daughter, a girl just left school, but in vain. The girl, in a painful scene, demands to be told the truth, and the mother, unable to bear the sight of her child's misery, flies from home, hoping still in some way to retrieve the past. But the net of circumstance is too strongly woven.
ENTER AN AMERICAN
By E. Crosby-Heath, Author of 'Henrietta taking Notes.'