Irish Dealer.  “WELL, HOW WOULD YE LIKE HIM BRED?  IF HE WAS FOR SIR PATHRICK UP AT THE CASTLE HE’D BE BY RED EAGLE OUT AV AN ASECTIC MARE, BUT YE CAN SUIT YERSILF.”]

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OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

(By Mr. Punch’s Staff of Learned Clerks.)

If for nothing else, Mr. JACK LONDON’S latest story would deserve a welcome for its topicality.  In these days of strikes and industrial conflict every one might be glad to know what a writer of his individuality has to say about unions and blacklegs and picketing.  True, this is hardly the kind of thing that one has learnt to associate with his name; and for that reason perhaps I best liked The Valley of the Moon (MILLS AND BOON) after its hero and heroine had shaken the unsavoury dust of the town from their feet and set them towards the open country.  But much had to happen first.  The hero was big Billy Roberts, a teamster with the heart of a child and the strength of a prize-fighter—­which was in fact his alternative profession.  He married Saxon Brown ("a scream of a name” her friend called it when introducing them to each other), and for a time their life together was as nearly idyllic as newly-wedded housekeeping in a mean street could permit it to be.  Then came the lean years:  strikes and strike-breaking, sabotage and rioting, prison for Billy, and all but starvation for Saxon.  Perhaps you know already that peculiar gift of Mr. JACK LONDON’S that makes you not only see physical hardship but suffer it?  I believe that after these chapters the reader of them will never again be able to regard a newspaper report of street-fighting with the same detachment as before, so vivid are they, so haunting.  In the end, however, as I say, we find a happier atmosphere.  The adventures of Billy and Saxon, tramping it in search of a home, soon make their urban terrors seem to them and the reader a kind of nightmare.  Here Mr. LONDON is at his delightful best, and his word-pictures of country scenes are as fresh and fine as anything he has yet done. The Valley of the Moon, in short, is really two stories—­one grim, one pleasant, and both brilliantly successful.

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It is perhaps a mistake to read a novel at a sitting, since the reaction is too sudden and the reader is apt to find the real life and the real people surrounding him highly unsatisfactory by contrast.  Mr. JAMES PROSPER has reduced me to this state by The Mountain Apart (HEINEMANN), but it is my duty as critic to disregard my personal feelings and judge impartially between the fictitious and the actual.  Duty, then, compels me to say that the Mr. Henry Harding who at the last solved all the difficulties of Rose Hilton by the simple expedient of a romantic proposal is a hollow fraud.  The position was this:  Rose was a woman of flesh and blood and all