A FAIR WARNING.
Barber (turning sharply round, to the grave discomfiture of his client's nose). "Don't go, Sir; it's your turn next."
OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
The consideration of Fear seems to have a special appeal for the Benson Bros. Only the other day did Robert Hugh write a clever and hauntingly horrible story round it, and now here is Arthur Christopher discoursing at large upon the same theme in Where No Fear Was (Smith, Elder). It is a book that you will hardly expect me to criticise. One either likes those gentle monologues of Mr. Benson or is impatient under them—and in any case the comments of a third party would be superfluous. Personally, I should call this one of the most charming of those many hortatory volumes that have come from his prolific pen; he has a subject that interests him, and is naturally therefore at his best in speaking of it. Many kinds of fear are treated in the book—those common to us all in childhood and youth and age; and there are chapters dedicated to men and women who have notably striven with and overcome the dragon—Johnson and Charlotte Brontë and Carlyle, and that friend of his, John Sterling, whose letter from his death-bed the author quotes and rightly calls "one of the finest human documents." So now you see what kind of book it is, and whether you yourself are likely to respond to its appeal. It will, I am firmly persuaded, bring encouragement to many and add to the already large numbers who owe a real debt of gratitude to the writer. Somewhere he has a passing reference to the time when first he began to receive letters from unknown correspondents. It set me thinking that it was no slight achievement to have said so many human and helpful things so unpriggishly. And certainly no one could call Where No Fear Was a pedantic work; its qualities of gentle humour and, above all, of sincerity absolve it from this charge and should commend it even to those who, as a rule, suffer counsel unwillingly.
Forrard, so to speak, in Mr. Cutcliffe Hyne's latest book you shall discover the three redoubtable stokers from whom it derives its title of Firemen Hot (Methuen). Combining the stedfast affection and loyalty of the Three Musketeers or the imperishable soldiers of Mr. Kipling with a faculty, when planning an escapade, for faultless English, only equalled by that of the flustered client explaining what has happened to the lynx-eyed sleuth, they are as stout a trio as ever thrust coal into a furnace or fist into a first mate's jaw. English, American and Scotch (and this would seem to be another injustice to the Green Island), in many ports and on many seas they have many wild yet not wicked adventures, knowing, with an instinctive delicacy born perhaps of the perusal of monthly magazines, where (even whilst crossing it) to draw the line. Aft, you shall come across once more the evergreen Captain Kettle, with his sartorial outfit unimpaired, his endless tobacco reserves not withered by a single leaf from their former glory. About wind-jammers and tramp-steamers and the harbours of all the world the author writes familiarly as usual, and has several ingenious plots to unfold, together with one or two that are not so good; and I suppose that the whisky drunk in the pages of Firemen Hot would float a small battleship, and the men laid out with lefts to the jaw, if set end to end, stretch from Hull to Plymouth Docks. I sometimes wonder whether Mr. Cutcliffe Hyne ever in an idle hour picks up a book by Mr. Conrad, and, if so, what he thinks of it.