Absentee. “I WAS PLAYING FOOT-BA’ IN THE STREET, AND THE POLICE TOOK AND LOCKED ME UP FOR FOUR HOURS.”

Teacher. “DID YOU GET ANYTHING TO EAT?”

Absentee. “AY—­A HARD ROLL.”

Teacher.  “WHAT DID YOU DO WITH IT?”

Absentee.  “PLAYED FOOT-BA’.”]

* * * * *

OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

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

The title, somewhat puzzling at first, which Miss F.E.  MILLS YOUNG has given to her latest story, The Almonds of Life (HODDER AND STOUGHTON), turns out to be based upon a Chinese proverb to the effect that “almonds came to those who have no teeth.”  This rather devastating sample of philosophy (which I have put by for use against the next person who attempts to work off upon me the adage about those who wait) forms the text of a well-told tale of misplaced affections.  As you may expect, if you know Miss YOUNG’S former work, it is a South African story, not concerned however with Boers and natives and the trackless veld, but with coastwise civilization and suburban garden-parties.  As before, the author excellently conveys the place-feeling, so well indeed that I was sorry when the love intrigues of the two protagonists necessitated their quitting Africa for a more conventional Italian setting.  I may summarise the plot by telling you that the particular almond that fell too late to the heroine was somebody else’s husband.  But it wasn’t so much that she was unable to eat him as that he proved indigestible when swallowed.  The lady was Gerda, young and dazzling bride of the middle-aged Fred Wooten, and the gentleman one of her husband’s closest friends, also (before the arrival of Gerda) happily married to a wife whom I found the most attractive person in the book.  I need not further detail the crooked course of untrue love, though I may hint at a fault in balance, where your sympathy, previously and rightly enlisted for poor betrayed Fred, is demanded for Gerda in her difficulty with the almond.  As usual, Miss YOUNG unfolds her plot with admirable directness, chiefly through a natural and unforced dialogue, so easy that it disguises its own art.

* * * * *

If any reasonable man still possesses a grain of sympathy with Bolshevism I invite him to purge himself by reading With the “Die-Hards” in Siberia (CASSELL).  In August, 1918, Colonel JOHN WARD, M.P., reached Vladivostok in command of the 25th Battalion Middlesex Regiment, and from the time of his arrival until his departure nearly a year later his position was almost grotesquely difficult.  Of our Allies in Siberia and of their policy he writes with justifiable frankness.  Our own is not excused, but he lets us clearly see that however ineffectual it may have been there was honesty of purpose underlying it.  In the medley of confusion which prevailed we were