“We also had songs, the College song, and the Harrow School song, for the special benifit (sic) of the Governor, who is an Etonian.”

* * * * *

[Illustration:_Motor-Launch Officer_ (who has rung for full-speed without result).  “WHAT’S THE MATTER?”

Voice from below.  “ONE OF THE CYLINDERS IS MISSING, SIR.”

Commander.  “WELL, LOOK SHARP AND FIND THE BALLY THING—­WE WANT TO GET ON.”]

* * * * *

OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

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

I was some way into Thorgills of Treadholt (WARD, LOCK), thinking what an unusually plausible and imaginative yarn it was, when I turned back for possible enlightenment, and found a note to the effect that it was a transcription of an Icelandic saga.  Those old fellows knew their business.  I am not sagacious enough to guess where Mr. MAURICE HEWLETT has passed beyond transcription to creation, but I can tell you that he offers his readers a very charming and finished piece of work.  Boys of all ages should delight in this record of the fights and wanderings and stout diplomacy of the chieftain Thorgills, who was destined from his cradle to be a notable leader of men.  His marriage with Thorey was a romance of as exquisite a flavour as any that our sophisticated age can show, and its tragic end wrings the heart with its infinite pathos.  By some singular discretion Mr. HEWLETT has chosen to eschew the least approach to Wardour-Street idiom, and this gives the narrative a simplicity, a sanity and a vivid sense of reality which are extraordinarily more effective than the goodliest tushery, of which flamboyant art Mr. HEWLETT is no mean master.  I am sure he has chosen this time a more excellent way.  There are transcriptions and transcriptions.  This is brilliantly done.

* * * * *

I cannot help regretting that Miss RHODA BROUGHTON has not thought fit to publish her total fictional tonnage (if without disrespect I may employ a metaphor of the moment) on the title-page of her latest volume.  Certainly the tale of her output must by this time reach impressive dimensions.  And the wonder is that A Thorn in the Flesh (STANLEY PAUL) betrays absolutely no evidence of staleness.  If the outlook here is a thought less romantic than in certain novels that drew sighs from my adolescent breast, this is a change inherent in the theme.  For the matter of the present work is a study in conjugal tedium. Parthenope (name of ill-omen) was one of those unhappy and devastating beings who go through life fated to bore their nearest and dearest to the verge of lunacy.  So that her marriage to poor well-meaning Willy Steele had not endured for more than a matter of weeks before the wretched man fled from his newly-made nest, with the heart-cry (uttered to Parthenope’s female relatives, themselves