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that mysterious extra faculty with which the author has endowed his deliberately effeminate hero, particularly as neither of them seems to know much about it―and no more do I, for that matter. It is enough if I hint that by its timely aid a beauteous heroine is rescued from imprisonment at the hands of the militants, and a happy ending assured. For further details I must refer you to Toby Merivale.

Forlorn Adventurers (Methuen) is a book with many pleasant patches, but also a vast deal of what I can only regard as padding. I am unable to believe that such clever people as Agnes and Egerton Castle could not have told so simple a tale more crisply if they had really wanted to do so. Perhaps my irritation at having to plough through a superfluous number of pages in pursuit of the slender intrigue was intensified by the fact that they had been bound up in a haphazard fashion that always worries me beyond measure. But this by the way. When the Master of Stronaven lost his wife, by divorce, various meddling relations set out to find him another, in the person of the vacuous daughter of an Argentine millionaire. Shortly after their wedding, however, the Master developed heart disease, and, being bored with vacuity, reconciled himself with wife number one, and so died. I am far from saying that the tale is badly told, but I do say that there are too many scenes that retard instead of helping the action. And upon one point I must join issue with the authors. I entirely decline to believe that woman like Mrs. Duvenant, who, in her progress from a small shop to Connaught Place via the Argentine, had mastered at least the elementary rules of behaviour, would have comported herself with such ignorance and brutality in the house where her son-in-law lay on his death-bed. So much for carping. Now let me add that several of the subordinate characters are admirably drawn, especially perhaps Lady Martindale (a portrait-study, I should think, and a clever one). Also that the Scotch and Italian setting is the real thing. But the fact remains that the chief adventurers seem to have been too forlorn for either myself or the Egerton Castles to have been at our happiest in their society.

Despite her preface, which goes some way to disarm the critic, I am bound to say that I think Miss Constance Smedley would have been better advised to change the title of her latest novel, On the Fighting Line (Putnam). I am willing to believe that it was written before the War―indeed the fact is obvious―but when all is said it remains true that for us now there is only one battle, and that subsidiary fighting lines merely exasperate. This, I fear, has indeed been the abiding effect of the book upon me; even its good qualities vexed me that they were not better, and better employed. It is a record, in diary form, of the emotions of a girl typist in a big City office. Dare I confess that I rose from it with a feeling of profound sympathy for the office? Frankly, from almost every point of view the diarist (who has various names, though the junior partner generally called her Jasmine) struck me as unattractive. And most of her friends were even worse. Perhaps in a way I was not wholly free from prejudice. I can never keep a quite impartial mind about book-heroines who make obviously literary records of the emotions at the very instant of experiencing them. Moreover, you will not have progressed very far in this volume before you discover that, under a guise of sympathetic neutrality, you are really (if a man) being held up to ridicule because―you will never guess for what―because you are severe upon ladies who destroy the contents of pillar-boxes. There's a breath from the unregenerate past for you! No. Though I hasten to admit some freshness and charm about the week-end wooings of Jasmine and her junior partner, the story as a whole remains what have called it above―exasperating, because it is about types and ideas with which it is impossible in these big days to feel more than a faint academic sympathy.

Mr. R. Scotland Liddell, who gives us The Track of the War (Simpkin, Marshall), has made a motor tour of Belgium, chiefly in the company of a Belgian Red Cross officer, and has by his quiet modest showing put in gallant piece of work in the matter of relief of the wounded on the somewhat irresponsible plan which the twain adopted, working apparently under no orders but their own. If the book is not a completely satisfactory addition to the serious literature of the War it is because the author does no seem to possess a very judicial mind. He writes in a natural heat of indignation after seeing the traces of German frightfulness; but the case in bulk against the enemy is so unanswerable that what we chiefly need now is especial care never to weaken it by admitting any details without unimpeachable evidence. Our author does not avoid such phrases as "thousands of other instances," nor make allowance for the inevitable distortions of evidence given originally by witnesses distracted with fear and hate, and retailed at second and fifth hand in an unfamiliar language. Mr. Liddell covers the terrible ground―Dinant, Termonde, Aerschot, Andenne, Tamines―and quotes freely the official documents of the Belgian commissions; but adds, for instance in the case of recorded mutilations for which evidence should be still attainable, no first-hand personal testimony which would have given a special significance to his book. It remains a piece of competent but necessarily hurried journalism, not without a sense of atmosphere, and should prove particularly valuable to folk of sluggish imagination, like the Immortal who wrote to Lord Kitchener complaining about the taking off of his favourite train, and the kind of person who still counts it a disaster if the cook spoils the fish.

Owing, it is believed, to the fears of a German invasion, a zebra at the zoo assumes a neutral aspect.

Describing the battle of the Falkland Islands The Great War states:―

"... As the short winter day was drawing in a quick result was needed... But the winter sea was deadly cold."

Of course we knew that the Great War had turned the World upside down, but we had not realised that in the Southern Hemisphere the seasons had actually been reversed.