Polite Little Boy (suffering from repletion.) "Oh, please, Miss, don't ask me to have any more; I can't say no."
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
I think I should have detected what was the primary trouble with A Lad of Kent (Macmillan) if Mr. Herbert Harrison had given me any opportunity of studying Lord Haresfield at closer quarters. Upon the material vouchsafed it was impossible to spot in him the villain of the piece; I was only allowed to meet him at two brief interviews, throughout which he was consistently courteous and kind, with nothing of the murderer about him. There was, in this connection, not only suppressio veri, but even some suggestio falsi; at any rate I still have great difficulty in believing that a man so obviously intelligent and diplomatic could have initiated schemes so unnecessarily elaborate and entirely incompetent for the mere removal of an unknown and fatherless village youth. I make these observations only as in duty bound; for myself, I didn't care twopence who was trying to get rid of Phillip, or why. Provided they didn't succeed, I was content to leave them at it and enjoy the fascinating picture of life in a sea-coast village in the good old days when everybody was busy either in preventing or assisting the "free trade;" when a press-gang might come along at any moment and steal a man or two without so much as by your leave, and, generally speaking, things moved. Mr. Harrison has a delightful style, a perfect sympathy with the times of which he writes, and no small gift of characterization. Frankly, I don't believe he attaches any more importance to his plot than I do, for he is quite content to leave it to itself for several chapters on end.
The Double House (Stanley Paul) began attractively with a retired Indian colonel who had a mysterious sorrow and wished to betake himself to some quiet English hamlet "where echoes from his past might never penetrate." Of course this could hardly be called wise of the Colonel; the slightest knowledge of quiet English neighbourhoods in fiction or the drama might have assured him that towards the end of Act I. somebody was simply bound to turn up who knew all. However, he rented one half of a divided old manor house, and, even when informed that the other half was inhabited by a widow of quiet habits, he apparently did not share my own instant certainty that there were coincidences ahead. As a matter of fact E. Everett-Green, the author, had so arranged matters that this lady was the sister-in-law of a wicked murderer, for whose crime the gallant Colonel had himself been tried. So much for his past; but as a matter of fact that of the lady was ever so much more sinister. She had, it appeared, married a gentleman called Paul Enderby, only to learn after the ceremony that her husband had a twin-brother Saul, who must have been the twinniest twin that ever breathed, since at no moment could any living soul tell the two apart. I won't harrow you with details, but the confusion was such that, even after the unlamented decease of Paul, poor bewildered Mrs. Enderby was by no means sure that she wasn't only a bereaved sister-in-law. Her sad plight reminded me of nothing so much as that of the lady in Engaged who entreated to have three questions answered: "Am I a widow, and if so how came I to be a widow, and whose widow came I to be?" The great difference between the two cases is that this of Mrs. Enderby is meant to be taken with solemnity—a task that I regret to add was too heavy for me. I am only sorry that so charming a title as The Double House has been so sadly wasted.
If a wicked male novelist had dared to write Jacynth
