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    “A City pigeon swooped down suddenly out of nowhere and all but took
    the cap off a bricklayer at the rate of forty miles an hour.”—­Daily
    Paper.

It will be observed that the speed was that of the bird and not the bricklayer.

* * * * *

“At ——­ Church, on Monday last, a very interesting wedding was solemnised, the contracting parties being Mr. Richard ——­, eldest son of Mr. and Mrs. ——­, and a bouquet of pink carnations.”—­Welsh Paper.

There has been nothing like this since GILBERT wrote of—­

  “An attachment a la Plato
  For a bashful young potato.”

* * * * *

[Illustration:  “WOT YER MEAN PHOTOGRAPHIN’ MY WIFE?  I SAW YER.”

“YOU’RE QUITE MISTAKEN; I—­I WOULDN’T DO SUCH A THING.”

“WOT YER MEAN—­WOULDN’T?  SHE’S THE BEST-LOOKIN’ WOMAN ON THE BEACH.”]

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OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

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

Miss SHEILA KAYE-SMITH continues to be the chronicler and brief abstractor of Sussex country life.  Her latest story, Green Apple Harvest (CASSELL), may lack the brilliant focus of Tamarisk Town, but it is more genuine and of the soil.  There indeed you have the dominant quality of this tale of three farming brothers.  Never was a book more redolent of earth; hardly (and I mean this as a compliment) will you close it without an instinctive impulse to wipe your boots.  The brothers are Jim, the eldest, hereditary master of the great farm of Bodingmares; Clem, the youngest, living contentedly in the position of his brother’s labourer; and Bob, the central character, whose dark and changing fortunes make the matter of the book, as his final crop of tragedy gives to it the at first puzzling title.  There is too much variety of incident in Bob’s uneasy life for me to follow it in detail.  The tale is sad—­such a harvesting of green apples gives little excuse for festival—­but at each turn, in his devouring and fatal love for the gipsy, Hannah, in his abandonment by her, and most of all in his breaking adventures of the soul, now saved, now damned, he remains a tragically moving figure.  Miss KAYE-SMITH, in short, has written a novel that lacks the sunshine of its predecessors, but shows a notable gathering of strength.

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