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I must say that I found You Never Know Your Luck (Hodder and Stoughton) a great disappointment, the greater from my previous pleasure in the work of Sir Gilbert Parker. I do not object to it as formless, though it certainly is that, or as told in a confusing haphazard style. My complaint is that a fairly effective short story, based upon an unconvincing but mildly dramatic situation, has been inflated to the dimensions of a novel. For five pages of a magazine I might have been entertained to hear how Crozier had run away from the just anger of his wife, after breaking his promise not to bet; how she wrote him an angry letter, which he kept unopened for years (but there is no magazine published that could make me believe that); how the wife had really had a bit on of her own, and how, when she turned up to find Crozier recovering from gunshots and stumped for want of the ready, she steamed open the old envelope, put her own bet-gotten gains therein, and pretended they had been waiting there for him all the time. But as a grown-up book I could hardly think that this justified its author's reputation either in plot or characters. These last by the way have been quite delightfully illustrated in colour by Mr. W. L. Jacobs, who might surely have been mentioned upon the title-page. I am reminded, a little inconsequentially, of the lady who liked Botticelli's Birth of Venus, all but the central figure, which she found "rather a pity." Remembering Sir Gilbert's distinguished work in the past, I can only call his latest story rather a pity. But there may well be those to whom its appeal will be more successful. After all, you never know other people's luck.

Mr. Stephen McKenna must have been seriously annoyed by the outbreak of a war that has swept away the attention of his public from a subject in which he had reason to suppose it was quite keenly interested. At the same time I am not sure whether he has not something for which to be thankful; for that atmosphere of hazy distance that the curtain of the last eight months has drawn over events even so crude in outline as the activities of militant suffrage has converted into a moderately readable story what must otherwise have come perilously near to being a succession of impertinences. There is so little ambiguity about a date like 1913 that, but for this same curtain, most of us could give a guess as to who was Prime Minister and who Attorney-General at that time; and, on learning that members of their families had been kidnapped as a protest against the rejection of the Women's Suffrage Amendment, could place within quite a small circle the original of that brilliant criminal, Joyce, who planned the abductions, and incidentally won the heart of Toby Merivale, the narrator. We might even have begun to wonder how much was history and how much semi-official aspiration towards future achievement, instead of realising that the author had no purpose more serious than the embellishment of a yarn that should initiate tea-table discussion on the possibilities of The Sixth Sense (Chapman and Hall). It would not be quite playing the game for me to say what is