OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
A reflection that I could not resist after reading Love the Harper (Smith, Elder) was that the Boy appears in this volume as a very indifferent performer upon his instrument. For the muddle into which he plunged the amatory affairs of the inhabitants of Downside was terrible. Downside was a quiet delightful village, as lovingly described by Miss Eleanor G. Hayden, but the number of misplaced attachments it contained seemed, as Lady Bracknell once observed, "in excess of that which statisticians have laid down for our guidance." There was John Harding, the hero, who began by courting Phyllis, and subsequently transferred his suit to Ruth. There was Will, his brother, an even more inconstant lover, whom Phyllis (still nominally betrothed to John) adored at first sight, and who divided his own heart between Ruth, Phyllis and the crippled Miss Mayling. There was also Ruth herself, who thought she had a Past (she hadn't, at least it was all right really; but just in what sense it would be unfair to explain here) and therefore imagined herself for no man. The story begins with a wedding on the first page; and what with one thing and another I began to fear that this was the last consummation we were likely to get. But, of course, in the end—— But I shall not tell you how the couples finally re-sort themselves, because this is the author's secret, and one that she very craftily preserves till the last moment. It is arithmetically inevitable that there must be an odd woman left over in the end; but as to her identity I was entirely wrong, and so probably will you be. This ending is perhaps the best thing—I don't mean the words in an unkind sense—about a pleasant if not very thrilling story of a country that Miss Hayden evidently knows with the knowledge of affection.
Perhaps some of those who remember J. Burgon Bickersteth captaining the Oxford soccer team four years ago may be surprised to find him serving his apprenticeship at sky-piloting in Alberta. And very manfully and sincerely and tactfully he does it, to judge by the account which he modestly renders in The Land of Open Doors (Wells, Gardner). With headquarters at Edmonton he rides and drives or swims (when the floods are out or the bridges down) across this untidy country from shack to shack, holding odd little services in dormitories and kitchens, and evidently making friends with the rough pioneer folk, railway men and small farmers, of his assorted acquaintance. The discouragements of such a task must be immense; indeed, they peep through the narrative, reticently enough, for grousing habits are not in the equipment of this staunch and cheery young parson. His notes of this land of promise and swift achievement are admirably observed. He has the gift of characterisation with humour, is clever at reproducing evidently authentic and entertaining dialogues, and has caught the Western idiom, not only in these set reproductions, but unconsciously in his own writing, which is singularly straightforward and attractive, nor burdened with the sort of cleverness which the young graduate is apt to air. Neither is there anything of the prig in his composition—his book abounds in reported words which an earlier generation of clerics would certainly have censored—but when he is saddened by the indifference, the unplumbed materialism and what he sees as the wickedness of his scattered flock he might remember for his comfort that valid and sane distinction of the casuists between formal and material sin. Anyway, good luck to him for a sportsman!
OUR CURIO CRANKS.
The man who collects the chalk used by famous billiard-players.