"A correspondent who knows a great deal about the coat trade says there is going to be great difficulty in obtaining coal during the coming winter."—Torquay Times.
This will confirm the belief that the shortage of fuel is not unassociated with the vested interests.
"We, on the other hand, are just as much entitled, under any sane code of morals, to bombard Kerman towns as to shoot German soldiers on the field."—The Globe.
We think, however, that the inhabitants of these Persian towns might reasonably object to such vicarious reprisals.
OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
Our moorland novelists are of two schools. One of them depicts the dwellers on these heights as a superior race, using a vocabulary half Biblical, half minor-poetic, in which to express the most exalted sentiments; the other draws a picture of upland domesticity comparable to that found in a cage of hyenas. Mr. Halliwell Sutcliffe, though he is too skilled an artist to overdo the colouring, inclines (I am bound to say) so much towards the former method that I confess to an uneasy doubt, at times, whether any human families could maintain existence on the same plane of nobility as, for example, the Holts in his latest romance, Lonesome Heights (Ward, Lock). These Holts were a race of farmer-squires, and in the book you see their development through two generations: the masterful old man and his twin sons. This is all the tale; a simple enough record, but full of the dignity and beauty which make the reading of any story by this author a refreshment to irritated nerves. Towards the end some space is devoted to the fight to abolish child-labour in the dale mills; there is also a scandal, and the fastening of blame upon the wrong brother; no very great matter. It is for such scenes as that of the death of old Holt, and his last words to the horse that has thrown him, that Lonesome Heights will earn its place on your library list.