tale. The Magic Gate is a war-novel confessed, and I can only fancy that the thronging new sensations of the past three years have proved a little too much for Mrs. RAWSON’S sense of form.  She is so anxious that her heroine and her readers shall miss nothing of it all that in the result the plot is lost in a maze of incidents that lead nowhere.  The effect produced on a small country society by the early phases of the War is shown deftly enough.  But perhaps posterity will find in such a record a more compelling interest than we can to whom it is still so familiar in every unforgettable detail.  One other ground of complaint I have against the book is that its most original and attractive character, the American woman to whose generosity Jennet owes her occupancy of Fullbrook Manor, is banished at an early page, and submarined just when I was looking for her reappearance.  Hers is yet another story with which Mrs. RAWSON might have entertained me better than by this of The Magic Gate, which I found a trifle creaky on its hinges.

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Senlis (COLLINS) is one of the many places that have been systematically destroyed by the Germans.  It is difficult for anyone who has not seen the results with his own eyes to realise the business-like thoroughness which the Hun brings to this congenial task.  That a part (and the most beautiful) of the town still stands does not imply that he yielded either to slackness or to aesthetic refinement.  True that Miss CICELY HAMILTON relates a pleasing story that Senlis was saved from utter destruction by the entreaties of the cure, but, all the same, I think the real reason why the Bosch did not complete his work was that he was bundled out bag and baggage before he had time to add the finishing touches.  Miss HAMILTON clearly and soberly states the case against him, and makes it all the more damning by her frank recognition that many of the horrors of war, whoever makes it, are inevitable.  Her delightful account of Senlis itself, admirably illustrated with photographs, is certain to appeal to all lovers of the charm of old French towns; and the more poignantly when they recall how narrowly the best of its beauty escaped from the hand of the spoiler.

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[Illustration:  EPILOGUE]

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MR. PUNCH AS PROPAGANDIST.

I don’t know what decided him to do it.  I think he must have been a little fed up with our silly British way (rather attractive, all the same) of assuming that the whole world is bound to recognise the justice of our point of view without the use of propaganda to stimulate its intelligence.

Or else he had read somewhere that the Bolsheviks had been flooding the Hun trenches with Socialist literature and that the German Headquarters Staff had protested against this kind of thing as being contrary to etiquette, and he thought he couldn’t go far wrong if he did something that was contrary to Bosch etiquette.