Speaker (endeavouring to cultivate a patriotic spirit in the young). "And now, children, if you saw our glorious flag waving triumphantly over the battle-field, what would you think? (Prolonged pause) Come, come, what would you —— Well, my little man, what would you think?"
Small Boy. "Please, Zur, the wind were blowin'."
OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
"I remember, I remember...." Still on every side echoes the poet's cry, while scarce a publisher but can prove that the thoughts of age make long, long books. Certainly not the shortest of these, but among the most readable, is A Medley of Memories (Arnold), in which the Right Rev. Sir David Hunter-Blair has embodied the recollections of his very active career as Benedictine monk and a leading figure in the world of British Catholicism. Eton, Oxford, Rome, and (of course) his own famous monastery at Fort Augustus, are the chief scenes of it; and about them all Sir David talks vividly, even brilliantly. I am not saying that all this pleasant garrulity would not have been the better for the blue pencil, especially in those chapters in which the writer's memory dwells almost to excess upon the births, marriages, deaths and dinner-parties of the orthodox Peerage. Elsewhere, however, Sir David finds occasion in plenty for the exercise of a wit so dextrously handled that often his thrust is delivered before you have realized that the rapier has left its sheath. I had marked a score of examples for quotation (and now have space for none) and twice as many good stories. In the Oxford recollections it was pleasant to renew my own lively memories of a certain notorious lecture by Mr. Walter Walsh on Ritualistic Societies, when violence was narrowly averted by the tactful chairmanship of the present Lord Chancellor—a lecture from which (as Mr. Belloc observed at the time) "each member of the large audience departed confirmed and strengthened in whatever convictions he might previously have entertained." I sincerely hope that Sir David has yet in store for us those latter-day gleanings which he has been compelled to dismiss for the present as being too recent for print.
Mr. G. B. Stern has set himself to study with sympathy and a candour which extenuates nothing the Jew in England in the circumstances of war, and in particular the Jew of German origin completely loyal to the country of his adoption, but suspected and persecuted by such simple folk (and journals) as are content to put their faith in equally simple proverbs about leopards and spots. I suppose if Children of No Man's Land (Duckworth) has a hero and heroine you will find them in Richard Marcus and his sister Deborah. Young Richard, passionately English, with all the simple unquestioning loyalty of the public-school boy, counts the months to the day when he can testify to this by bearing arms in his country's defence, but finds nothing open but internment or (by much wangling) a possible niche in a Labour battalion. Deborah's adventures are chiefly of the heart, or what passes for the heart with a common type of modern girl anxious to wring every sensation out of life that playing with fire can give. It does not do to betray one's age by expressing too confidently the idea that much of all the goings-on of Deborah and her friends Gillian and Antonia seems impossible. Mr. Stern certainly writes as if he knew what he was writing about, and there is so rich an exuberance in the way he crowds his canvas, and so much humour expressed and repressed in his point of view, that I found this a distinctly entertaining and instructive book.