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A London Posy (MILLS AND BOON) is a story with at least an original setting.  So far as I know, Miss SOPHIE COLE is the first novelist to group her characters about an actual London house preserved as a memorial to former inhabitants.  The house in question is that in Gough Square, where Dr. JOHNSON lived, and two of the chief characters are George Constant, the curator, and his sister, to whom the shrine is the most precious object in life ("housemaid to a ghost,” one of the other personages rather prettily calls her).  It therefore may well be that to ardent devotees of the great lexicographer this story of what might have happened in his house to-day will make a stronger appeal than was the case with me, who (to speak frankly) found it a trifle dull.  It might be said, though perhaps unkindly, that Miss COLE looks at life through such feminine eyes that all her characters, male and female, are types of perfect womanhood.  In Denis Laurie, the gentle essayist and recluse, one might expect to find some feminine attributes; but even the bolder and badder lots, whose task it is to supply the melodramatic relief, struck me as oddly unvirile.  But this is only a personal view.  Others, as I say, may find this very gentle story of mild loves and two deserted wives a refreshing contrast to the truths, so much stranger and more lurid than any fiction, by which we are surrounded.

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[Illustration:  [Owing to a scarcity of literary matter at the Front, our soldiers are sometimes reduced to telling each other tales.]

Private Jones.  “AND SHE SAYS, ‘OH!  WOT BLINKIN’ GREAT EYES YOU ’AVE, GRANDMOTHER!’ AND THE WOLF, ’E SAYS, ’ALL THE BETTER TER SEE YER WIV, MY DEAR.’”]