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is here and there no less deliberately jerked—is simply (and again designedly) sordid. Much better spend your time on a real jig-saw that will give you in the end a pretty picture, say, of little Teddy feeding his rabbits.

The Way of The Red Cross, to which Queen Alexandra has added some gracious and touching words, carries with it the most appealing of all recommendations. Simply and ably told by E. C. Vivian and J. E. Hodder Williams, it is a record of the splendid work done by The Red Cross Society and the St. John Ambulance Association, a record that must move the stoniest heart to pity and the most penurious to the conviction that the relief of pain is the only royal road to contentment of mind. Welcome, too, is the tribute paid to the wonderful work of the Voluntary Aid Detachments. Weariness and suffering nobly and silently borne both by our wounded and the brave men and women who tend them is the moving theme of these pages. No one, it can be said without any qualification, who has the love of country in his heart can fail to be stirred by them to feelings of the deepest thankfulness and the deepest pride—thankfulness that we have such workers eager to give of their best, pride that we have such men to be saved by their services. Messrs. Hodder and Stoughton are devoting all the profits of this book to The Times Fund for the Sick and the Wounded, and there is one way, and only one way, for us to show our gratitude.

Mrs. C. S. Peel, whom you may remember as the writer of that clever and amusing story, The Hat Shop, has now extended her millinery researches to the fashionable dress-maker. As a fact, however, the defect of Mrs. Barnet-Robes (Lane) is, to my thinking, that the glimpses which it affords of life in a Sloane Street modiste's are too brief to be more than tantalising. For the rest the book is in the main a story of contrasted careers (something on the lines of the industrious and idle apprentices), the subjects being two girls, daughters of a certain Ivor Selincourt. Of these only one, Thea, was the child of his legitimate wife, and she, being handicapped with a neurotic disposition and a too luxurious home, fell in love with a man who was already married, and eventually, after a lot of temperamental trouble, she killed herself. Meanwhile Gladys, the child of Ivor's earlier unacknowledged love, climbed from prosperity to fortune, established her mother in Sloane Street, and herself not only enjoyed a capital income as a fashion-plate artist, but eventually married the man of her heart and lived happy ever after. This distribution of fates is at least unlike the usual arrangement of the moralist. Perhaps I was intended to feel more sympathy for Thea than I could actually command. Frankly, she seemed to me not a little tiresome, since there was really no reason, apart from her native cussedness, why she shouldn't have been every bit as happy as her nameless half-sister. But, again, perhaps this was all part of the plan, and intended to show that personality can do more than birth to ensure contentment. Which I knew already. Still, Mrs. Peel has written a story that is at least partly delightful, though I could have wished her to talk a little more shop in it.

To any advocate of "mixed" marriages in India, or elsewhere for that matter, I recommend A Shadow of '57 (Fisher Unwin). Mrs. Scott Moncrieff has the whole problem at her finger tips, and although she gives an almost cruel picture of the Eurasian character it is impossible not to be riveted by the cogency with which it is presented. Like many women-novelists of to-day, Mrs. Scott Moncrieff strikes shrewder blows at her own sex than at mine, but whether this is because she understands it better is not for me to decide. Here, at any rate, we have several women held up for our laughter or our pity, while the men (most of whom are officers) are endowed with a glorious imperturbability that soothes their friends as much as it maddens their enemies. A Shadow of '57 is a "first" book, and the author has only to set her casual style in order to command success. As it is, she has won her place among those novelists (why, I wonder, are the majority of them women?) who know their India by heart, and realize the sacrifices that most Anglo-Indians are called upon to make.

I have just had an excellent interlude with corsairs and galeasses, pikes and calivers, linstocks and morions, turbans and scimitars, all in the Good Queen Bess's spacious days, and personally conducted by Mr. Rafael Sabatini, who is no ordinary tusher. Sir Oliver Tressilian, the Cornish knight who adored fair Rosamund Godolphin (she always contrived to believe the worst of him and so protract the very rough course of his true love), was "trepanned" by order of his half-brother Lionel; had a thoroughly rotten time as a galley-slave in a Spanish vessel; joined forces with some attacking Muslim pirates; became a renegade, the famed Sakr-el-Bahr, The Sea Hawk (which is the name of the book, and Mr. Secker publishes it), the most outrageous and effective corsair of them all; raided his Cornish home; carried off Lionel and Rosamund; narrowly escaped the scimitar of his Muslim and the yard-arm of his English enemies, but duly prevailed over all, and came back to honour in a land whose Queen never took too squeamish a view of piracy. I will confess myself a little bored with the susceptible Basha, Assad-ed-Din, and his intriguing family, but Sir Oliver of the iron thews, with his hereditary Tressilian violence, is a notable hero, a good hater, a stout fighter; and I only hope the credulous Rosamund turned over a new leaf and lived happily with him ever after, which on the whole was more than she quite deserved.

He. "That's my friend Davis. He's in Kitchener's Army, you know."

She. "What is he—a lieutenant?"

He. "No; he's a lance-corporal."

She (greatly impressed). "O-oh, really! Influence, I suppose."

"Thereupon the German commander ordered the deportation of all foreign Consuls including the Turkish, for weeks, frozen stiff."

Japan Chronicle.

After this treatment of Turkey's representative, the Sultan should now retaliate by giving the Kaiser "the frozen face."