If Mr. Bertram Smith's Caravan Days (Nisbet) has not made me eager to take to the road at once, the reason is that he seems to delight in things that I most cordially detest. For instance, he likes cooking and he is "very fond of rain." With such tastes he has more facilities for enjoying himself than are offered to most of us, and I find myself wondering whether life in a caravan, always supposing that he was not there to do the cooking and admire the rain, would be quite as much fun as he would have us believe. I am confident that when next he goes upon his travels the majority of his friends will be anxious to share the attractions of his Sieglinda, that caravan of caravans, but I doubt if they will be ordering Sieglindas for themselves. Meanwhile, so human has Mr. Bertram Smith made his Sieglinda that I can well imagine her sulking in her retirement because she wants to see Argyll, the only county in Scotland she has not yet sampled.
If you are a musical genius yourself and want to do a young composer a good turn, I implore you not to get his opera produced under the pretence that it is yours and wait until it has been received enthusiastically before you announce whose work it is. For that is what Jess Levellier did, and "Miss Louise Mack" tells us what a deal of trouble was brought about by this impulsive action. There are several love stories in The Music Makers (Mills and Boon). There is the affair of Jess and there is the affair of Jess's father; and in regard to the second of these I would say that I am a little tired of adventurous women who are first attracted by dollars and then find that they are head over ears in love with the man himself. But in case you are not adequately intrigued by either of these romances, I can also tell you that Sir William (big and burly) and Trixie Harrison, though married, gave considerable cause for anxiety before with "outstretched hands she went tottering towards him." Even the most jaded novel-readers will suffer thrills and surprises from The Music Makers, and occasionally, perhaps, they will wonder whether coincidence's long arm has not been stretched to the point of dislocation. However that may be, the book is breezy and its author is lavish of her material. Parsimonious writers would have made half-a-dozen novels out of the stuff of Mrs. Creed's book.
THE ART OF WINDOW-DRESSING.
Shop-Manager (sternly, to assistant). "Surely, Mr. Jenkins, you ought to know better than to put the Kitchen Cobbles in the centre vase. Remember in future that it is absolutely necessary you should always strike the key-note with the Selected Nuts."