Those who like a good "gashly" book should, my Baronite says, forthwith send for Lord Wastwater (Blackwood). The plot is so eerie, and its conclusion so incredulous, that the practised novel-reader, seeing whither he is being led, almost up to the last page expects the threatened blow will be averted by some more or less probable agency. But Mr. (or Miss) Sydney Bolton is inexorable. Lord Wastwater is dead now, and there can be no harm in saying that the House of Lords is well rid of his impending company. He would have made a sad Duke.
A little more than a year ago, in celebration of the seventieth birthday of Henriette Ronner, there was published a volume containing reproductions in photogravure of some of the works of that charming painter. Madame Ronner knows the harmless, necessary cat as intimately as Rosa Bonheur knows the horse or the ox. She has painted it with loving hand, in all circumstances of its strangely-varied life. No one knows, my Baronite says, how pretty and graceful a thing a cat is, till they study it with the assistance of Madame Ronner. Cassells afford opportunity of making this study by presentation of a new and cheaper edition of the volume, with cats in all attitudes purring round an interesting essay on themselves, and their Portraiture, contributed by Mr. H. M. Spielmann.
Wishing all of you, Constant Riters and Constant Readers, a Very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I am, yours ever,
The Blithesome Baron de Book-Worms.
CHRISTMAS NUMBERS.
(By a Comfort-loving Old Curmudgeon.)
