the record of his own actual experiences during two distinct phases of the War.  Not until the last page does he abandon the jest to explain—­with something of a school-boy grin—­just where fact and fiction meet, and so enable me to recover from my bewilderment and pass on a word of warning.  Once on your guard, however, you will find his story of the Servants of the Guns (SMITH, ELDER), and more especially the first half of it (dealing, in diary form, with his recent adventures as an officer of Artillery—­he does not state his present rank), as vivid and real as anything of the sort you have seen.  Field-gun warfare of to-day—­mathematics, telephones and mud—­with little more of old-time dash and jingle than the hope that some to-morrow may revive them in the Great Pursuit—­this is his theme; and above all the loyalty of the gunner to his guns.  Even the story-book part in the middle of the volume speaks of this finely and movingly; but here and there amongst his personal experiences comes a passage less consciously composed that tells it even better in the bareness of a great simplicity.

* * * * *

Mr. J.D.  BERESFORD’S new story, House-Mates (CASSELL), might be regarded as an awful warning to young gentlemen seeking bachelor-apartments.  Because, if the hero had been a little more careful about his fellow-lodgers at No. 73 Keppel Street, he would not, in the first place, have been defrauded of a large sum of money, or, in the second, have been involved in a peculiarly revolting murder. (The special hatefulness of this murder strikes me as rather superfluous.  But this by the way.) On the other hand, of course, he would never have married the heroine, and we should have missed a very agreeable study of expanding adolescence.  This, I take it, is the real motive of Mr. BERESFORD’S story, as exemplified by his pleasant introductory metaphor of the chicken and the egg.  From the feminine point of view, indeed, the tale might be not inaptly labelled “Treatise on Cub-hunting.”  Anyhow, what with strange actresses and I.D.B. criminals and painted ladies and reviewers (they were a queer lot at No. 73!) the hero completes his tenancy with enough experience of life, chiefly on its shadowy side, to last him for some time.  An original and rather appealing story, told with a good deal of charm.

* * * * *

I was waiting for it, and now, behold, it has come.  In The Shining Heights (MILLS AND BOON) the War is over and we have to do with some of the results of it.  Unfortunately Miss I.A.R.  WYLIE is very chary about dates, and she is not encouraging about the changes which most of us hope will come with peace.  “Social conditions indeed,” she writes, “had scarcely moved.  Universal brotherhood was not ... and, for the vast majority of men and women it had been easiest to go back to the old work, the old pleasure, the old love and the old hate.”  Well, I don’t know much