her purpose the world now knows.  If any fault is to be found with the author’s style, it is that the limpidity and evenness of its flow make great events less easy of distinction than perhaps they might be; but most people will hail this as a merit rather than a fault, and I agree with them.  Colonel PALMER records the names of the first three Americans who died fighting.  The French General to whose unit they were attached ordered a ceremonial parade and made a speech in which he asked that the mortal remains of these young men be left in France.  “We will,” he continued, “inscribe on their tombs, ’Here lie the first soldiers of the United States to fall on the soil of France for Justice and Liberty’ ...  Corporal Gresham, Private Enright, Private Hay, in the name of France I thank you.”  As another matter of historical interest it may be stated that the first shot of the War on the American side was fired by Battery C of the 6th Field Artillery, “without waiting on going into position at the time set.  The men dragged a gun forward in the early morning of October 23rd, and sent a shell at the enemy.  There was no particular target.  The aim was in the general direction of Berlin.  The gun has been sent to West Point as a relic.”

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I must assume that Such Stuff as Dreams (MURRAY) was written by C.E.W.  LAWRENCE with a purpose, but it remains obscure to me.  A smart young married clerk in the oil business falls off the top of a bus on to his head and, from a confirmed materialist, becomes something not unlike a confirmed lunatic, with a faculty for seeing flaming emanations which enable him to place the owners of them in the true scale of human and spiritual values.  He discovers that his wife’s uncle, a whimsical but essentially tedious drunkard, is a better man than the egregious New Religionist pastor—­a discovery I made for myself without falling off a bus.  I was forced to the conclusion that these and equally dull, or duller, folk must exist or have existed, and that it could not possibly have been necessary to invent them.  And if I am right then it obviously needs a greater sympathy than I can command to do justice to this type of narrative, with its presuppositions and inferences.  Sir A. CONAN DOYLE has much to answer for.

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I do not remember the precise number of murders which occur in Droonin’ Watter (ALLEN AND UNWIN), but readers of this sensational story can accept my assurance that Mr. J.S.  FLETCHER has a quick and decisive way of meting out justice (or injustice) to his characters.  In fact, from the very start, when a man with a black patch over his eye walks into Berwick-upon-Tweed and takes lodgings with Mrs. Moneylaws (the mother of the man who tells the tale), the pace is red-hot.  It is easy enough to discover improbabilities in such a yarn as this, but the only important question is whether one wants to discover what happens in the end, and I confess without a blush that I did want to follow Mr. J.S.  FLETCHER to the last page.  Let me however beg him in his next book to give the word “yon” a rest; four “yons” in eleven lines is a clear case of overcrowding; and I invite the attention of the Limited Labour Party to this scandal.