Page:Punch Vol 148.djvu/329

Irish Sergeant (lecturing upon the rifle). "Now if ye'll listen and not intherrupt, I'll tell ye all about it―and if anny ay ye don't undershtand shtop me at onst."

In The Fabulists (Mills and Boon) Mr. Bernard Capes puts his practised pen to very much less effective use than usual. Some freak of mind or circumstance has betrayed him into a perverse experiment―the experiment of the too-short story of mystery. Of course in fiction notions of the very maddest may be made plausible for purposes of entertainment if there be sufficiently adroit preparation. An atmosphere must be created, a mood induced in the reader. Mr. Capes leaves these necessary things out and gives his shock in shorthand. Take "The White Hare." Modred shoots at a white hare and misses; simply can't understand it; assumes witchcraft; loads with a silver bullet; fires and kills; goes home to find his love dead. Later, his mother-in-law comes to die. "Cut the cursed thing out of me," says she. "What cursed thing?" says he. "Why, your silver bullet. 'Twas me you hit. I killed your girl to mislead you." So Modred with a howl of fury tore it out, and a white hare jumped through the window. Behold all! And it's typical. I have compressed the narrative slightly. Mr. Capes gives it a bare two pages and a-half, and the thing simply cannot be done so cheaply. These are indeed not short stories so much as skeleton notes for them. For so clever a writer The Fabulists seems rather a bad break.

The Minor Horrors of War (Smith, Elder) is an opportune little volume with very unexpected qualities. To quote the publishers, "these articles, which have appeared since the beginning of the war in The British Medical Journal, deal with various insect and other pests which cause disgust, discomfort, and often disease amongst our troops now fighting in all quarters of the globe." Very well then. Practical, you might say, and probably well worth the eighteen-pence of its price as a gift to somebody at the Front, but hardly a book to be read at home with pleasure and entertainment. There, however, you would be wrong. The writer, Dr. A. E. Shipley, F.R.S., has such a way with him that he can turn even the most unmentionable insects to favour and to pleasantry. For my own part his unexpected quips have kept me in chuckles. You recall Mr. Dombey's pronouncement―quoted here―that "Nature is on the whole a very respectable institution," which Dr. Shipley caps with the admission that there are, however, times when she presents herself in a form not to be talked about. I can hardly therefore indicate even the headings of his chapters. But I may, perhaps, take the one upon (if you will permit me) the flea as typical of the author's method. It contains a couple of quotations so pleasant that I cannot forbear to reproduce them. In one the indifference of the Turks to the attacks of this pest is explained by analogy from the words of the schoolboy who wrote: "A man with more than one wife is more willing to face death than if he only had one." The other is the plaint of a distinguished French lady: "Quant à moi, ce n'est pas la morsure, c'est la promenade!" I call that a very jolly way of discussing fleas.

Nora Bendelow was what one might call a rather unlucky girl. It is bad enough to come home from school for the