“Sir I have the honour and the opportunity to write you a letter and I am coming to ask you and to pray you perhapse perchance it is possible to found for me employment for translator.  I am verry sorry and mutch vex grieve bother pester haras teass consequently accordingly consequtivey I made you acknowledg may petion request and to bid you peradvanture well you occpied me for 6 months with a contract.  I beg you verry mutch to anwer respond reply if that letter I supose deeme concieve cogitate mediat when you will received my letter you will respond me at once imadiatty from your cervill and faitfull.”

It is inferred that the would-be “translator” kept a dictionary at his elbow and took no chances.

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[Illustration:  Visitor.  “YOU FOUGHT WITH THE GALLANT 51ST DIVISION, DID YOU NOT?”

Scot.  “AY—­D’YE MIND MY FACE?”

Visitor.  “OH—­NOT AT ALL.”]

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OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

(BY MR. PUNCH’S STAFF OF LEARNED CLERKS.)

I wonder if I am alone in a feeling of impatience and bewilderment over what I may call half-fairy stories.  Magic I understand and love; but this now diluted form of it leaves me cold.  Take for example the book that has occasioned this complaint, The Curious Friends (ALLEN AND UNWIN), an unconventional and perhaps just a little silly tale about a secret association of children and grownups, pledged to mutual help and a variety of altruistic aims—­a scheme, with all its faults, at least human and understandable.  But Miss C.J.  DELAGREVE has chosen to complicate it by (apparently) a dash of the supernatural, in the person of a character called Saint Ken, about whom we are told that he lived in a tunnel on the Underground and employed himself in helping distressed passengers.  Well, what I in my brutal way want to know is whether this is a joke, or what.  Because if I have to credit it, over goes the rest of the plot into frank make-believe.  And fantasy of this kind consorts but ill with a scheme that embraces such realities as heart-failure and typhus.  Not in any case that Miss DELAGEEVE’S plot could be called exactly convincing.  “Preposterous” would be the apter word for this society of the Blue-Bean Wearers, in which vague elderly persons wandered about with sadly self-conscious children and talked like the dialogue in clever books.  This at least was the impression conveyed to me.  I may add that I was continually aware of a certainty that Miss DELAGREVE will do very much better when she selects a simpler and less affected subject.

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