Suzanne ridicules my doublings and declares that she could make her aunt swallow anything.  I wish she could have made her swallow my tonic.

* * * * *

[Illustration:  THE QUESTION OF THE YACHTING CAP.

HE DIDN’T WANT TO LOOK LIKE EVERY TOM, DICK AND HARRY, HE SAID, SO HE
DECIDED TO GO IN HIS YACHTING CAP.]

* * * * *

[Illustration:  BRITISH ASSOCIATION DELEGATES DISCUSSING ORIGIN OF STREET ARAB’S EJACULATION, “YAH-YAH-YAH-SHR-R-RUP!”]

* * * * *

    KAMENEFF to KRASSIN (on applying for passports):  “Cras ingens
    iterabimus aequor.”

* * * * *

[Illustration:  Host. “HALF A MINUTE!  I’LL LIGHT YOU TO THE GATE; IT’S VERY DARK.”

Cheerful Guest. “THAT’S ALL RIGHT.  I CAN SEE IN THE DARK.  WHY, WHEN I WAS IN FLANDERS—­”

Host. “YES, YES; BUT YOU’RE NOT IN FLANDERS NOW—­YOU’RE IN MY CARNATION BED.”]

* * * * *

OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

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

It would certainly have been a thousand pities if the coming of Peace had deprived us of anything so cheerfully stimulating as the tales of “SAPPER” (CYRIL MCNEILE).  His Bull-Dog Drummond (HODDER AND STOUGHTON) shows all the old breathless invention as active as ever, while the pugnacity—­to give it no stronger term—­is wholly unrestrained, even by what might seem the unpromising atmosphere of Godalming in 1919.  It would, of course, be utterly beyond my scope to give in barest outline any list of the wild and whirling events that begin when Captain Hugh Drummond selects the most encouraging of the answers to his “Bored ex-soldier” advertisement and meets the writer, a cryptic but lovely lady, in the Carlton lounge.  (Judging by contemporary fiction, what histories could those walls reveal!) After that the affair almost instantly develops into one lurid sequence of battle, murder, bluff and the kind of ten-minutes-here-for-courtship which proves that there is a gentler side even to the process of tracking crime.  As usual, though less in this business than most, because of the engaging humour of the hero, I experienced a mild sympathy for the arch-villains; and indeed they might well feel some bitterness when, after being described as the master-intellects of the age, the author required them to conduct their most secret affairs in a lighted ground-floor room with the curtains undrawn.  Most of them turn out to be Bolshevists, or at least in the receipt of Soviet subsidies—­though I see a well-known Labour Daily reviewed the plot as unconvincing.  Odd!  Anyhow, a rattling story.

* * * * *