A VERY GREAT MAN.
(Cub Hunting.)
Young Farmer. "Well, Master Jack! Out again?"
Master Jack. "Why, Yes. Fact is, you know, always like to get as much in as possible before we begin to Advertise. Brings such a beastly lot o' Duffers out, don't you know!"
OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
Chatto and Windus have just issued a new edition of Ouida's Dog of Flanders. The well-got-up and cheaply-priced volume contains three other Stories, nearly as charming. In the quartette Ouida, my Baronite says, will be found at her best—Ouida, without the weeds of grossness and comical classicality that sometimes grow in her pastures. Of this volume of her works it may be said that, happily, Lemprière is not in it.
To those about to travel, whether there and back, or there or back, is immaterial, the Baron strongly recommends The Great Shadow and Beyond the City, two stories in one volume by Conan Doyle, published in Arrowsmith's three and sixpenny series. It is a long time since the Baron has read a more dramatically told story than that of The Great Shadow. Truly, if his opinion had been asked, he would have seriously advised any novelist against attempting, in any form, a description of the Battle of Waterloo. Yet, though Conan Doyle has done it admirably, there is, thinks the Baron, just one chapter too much of this work. No one, since Charles Lever wrote, has achieved anything like it, though there is just a smack of Orthis Mulcaney & Co. about it which—"but that is another story." The Baron finding no fault with the illustrations as illustrations, wishes that the tales had been left to themselves, and that they had been told without these superfluous aids. It is a pleasure to recommend such a book, and it is recommended by everybody's trusted Literary Adviser, The Baron de Book-Worms.