There is nothing wrong with Mr. Eden Phillpotts' latest collection of short stories, The Judge's Chair (Murray), but there is something vigorously to protest against upon the wrapper that covers them. For there I found an uncompromising statement to the effect that these stories "bring to a conclusion the author's Dartmoor work," and no sooner had I read it than my heart sank into my heels. Solemnly I plead with him to reconsider this decision, for if he does not his innumerable admirers will be deprived of something almost as annual and quite as enjoyable as Christmas. If he wants a holiday let him have one by all means, though personally I was not pleased when he left Dartmoor for Italy. But let it be only a holiday, a break in his real business. As for the book, I advise everyone who can appreciate dry humour and quaint philosophy to sit behind The Judge's Chair. "The Two Farmers" is in its way a masterpiece, grim and very real, and there is not the ghost of a sign in the whole collection that Mr. Phillpotts has written of Dartmoor until he is tired of it or it of him. He has made a niche for himself in that old temple of Nature, and we must all try to persuade him to stay there.
I have been reading a book, written by the Rev. H. S. Pelham, and published by Macmillan, which is at least twenty times as absorbing and moving as any novel. It is called The Training of a Working Boy. I daresay you may have met with other volumes on something like the same theme before, and may suppose you know all about camps and evening schools and blind-alley employment and the rest of it. But I am pretty well sure that you have read nothing more practical and human on the questions of boydom. It is, indeed, the humanity, sympathetic and more than half humorous, of Mr. Pelham's attitude that gives his book its appeal and incidentally, I fancy, explains his success with the object of it. His little volume is a plea for personal rather than pecuniary help, and is directed more especially to Midlanders, since its chief concern is with the boy population of Birmingham. I can only wish for it the largest possible number of readers in the shires and elsewhere, since to read it is inevitably to be moved to active sympathy.
This picture illustrates the deadly struggle which goes on daily between rival seaside resorts. It represents a party of hirelings in the pay of Wobblethorpe-on-Sea engaged in running up the rainfall of Little Blinkington.
"The selection of a player for the leading rôle, that of Pallas Athene, the beautiful goddess of Greek mythology, was successfully accomplished when Miss Genevieve Clark, the pretty and vivacious daughter of Speaker Clark, consented to take the part. Those who know Miss Clark and Greek mythology will realise at once that there will be a natural affinity between the player and the character."
Washington (D. C.) Post.
We never actually met Pallas Athene, but have always heard of her as being neither very pretty nor vivacious.