Montreal Gazette.
If this is so America was hardly worth discovering.
Long-suffering Vegetarian Lodger. "Don't trouble to cook the caterpillars in future, Mrs. Gedge. I never eat them."
OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
The dry sticks, as it were, of The Bale Fire (Hutchinson) are not very cunningly laid, with the result that from a spectacular point of view the conflagration fizzles out rather tamely. But there are so many bright passages in the book and so many sympathetic sketches of characters that I cannot help wishing the Frasers (Hugh and Mrs.) had either written a longer story depending completely on the interplay of temperament, or else built more carefully on their melodramatic substructure. For though Captain Mayhune, the villain of the piece, is the proprietor of a gaming-hell and terrorises Lady Trague with a piece of blotting-paper on which may be read a portion of her letter to a young man whom she indiscreetly though innocently adores, nothing very serious comes of his machinations, and our interest in the book is mainly confined to the emotional relations between Sir Charles, a fussy elderly martinet, his too young wife, and Maisie, her seventeen-year-old step-daughter, who varies from deeper moods to those of a silly and self-willed child. Then there is Captain Mayhune himself, a man of good impulses and evil, in whom, somehow or other, though never without a struggle, the evil always triumphs. Other characters are rather jerkily introduced, amongst whom a family of good-natured and thoroughly "nice" Americans, who help to straighten things out and bring people to a better understanding, are most conspicuous. But that piece of blotting-paper! If I were a stationer and kept a circulating library, I think I should try to turn an honest penny by selling sand to my customers along with their packets of linen-wove and blue-black writing-fluid. "Simple, effective, and leaves no chance to the blackmailer."