Mr. KIPLING is putting the finishing touches to a new Jungle book.  The first and second Jungle books have waited too long for this new companion; but it is now on its way.  A friend of the author, who has been privileged to see an early copy, says that it is full of all the old enchantment.

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Our Burwash correspondent informs us that, not content with the re-incarnation of Mowgli, Mr. KIPLING has completed a new romance of wandering life in India, not unlike Kim in treatment, to be entitled The Great Trunk Road.

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An album has just come to light, the value of which is beyond computation.  On the faded leaves of this book, which once belonged to Fanny Brawne, are inscribed three new poems in KEATS’S own hand.  Not mere album verses, but poems of the highest importance, equal to rank to the Odes to the Grecian Urn and the Nightingale.  The book itself will be sold by auction next week, but meanwhile the poems are to be issued in pamphlet form by Sir SIDNEY COLVIN.

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An enterprising firm of publishers announces for immediate publication a volume by President WILSON, entitled From White House to Buckingham Palace.  This work is in the form of a diary of singular frankness, and it contains some vivid accounts of conversations as well as the writer’s honest opinion of some of the most prominent personages of the moment.

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Admirers of O. HENRY will be excited to hear that a bundle of MS. stories in his best vein, some seventy-five all told (and how told!), has been discovered in a cupboard in one of his old lodgings:  much as the manuscript of TENNYSON’S In Memoriam was found in his rooms in Mornington Crescent.  How it happened that the historian of the joys and sorrows, the comedies and tragedies, of little old Baghdad-on-the-Subway neglected to send these tales to editors we shall never know, but he was always erratic.  The book will be published at once, both in America and England.

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After an interval of several years—­far too many—­Sir JAMES BARRIE has finished a new novel.  With his customary reticence he withholds both the title and the subject; but the important thing is that the book is at the binders.

Having read those announcements I succumbed to precedent and woke up.

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AN ARTFUL APPEAL.

From a Japanese business circular:—­

“Ladies and Gentlemen,—­Congratulating upon the great victory of our Allies, we want to supply you Water Colour Pictures and Antique Prints fresh and much selected subjects painted by the most famous artists in Japan; so we long to have the honour to receive your favourable inspection and enjoy yourselves with triumphing victory for Our Lord’s blessing in X’mas time.”

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