Counsel. "Prisoner is the man you saw commit the theft?"
Witness (a bookmaker). "Yes, sir."
Counsel. "You swear on your oath that prisoner is the man?"
Witness. "Yes, sir."
Sporting Judge. "Are you prepared to give me five to two on the prisoner being the man?"
Witness. "Ah, I'm sorry, me lord, but I'm taking a holiday to-day. Nothing doing."
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
Ellen Melicent Cobden can certainly not be accused of writing too hurriedly. I don't know how many years it is since, as "Miles Ambed," she captured my admiration with that wonderful first novel, Wistons; and now here is her second, Sylvia Saxon (Unwin), only just appearing. I may say at once that it entirely confirms my impression that she is a writer of very real and original gifts. Sylvia Saxon is not a pleasant book. It is hard, more than a little bitter, and deliberately unsympathetic in treatment. But it is grimly real. Sylvia herself is a character that lives, and her mother, Rachel, almost eclipses her in this same quality of tragic vitality. The whole tale is a tragedy of empty and meaningless lives passed in an atmosphere of too much money and too little significance. The "society" of a Northern manufacturing plutocracy, the display and rivalry, the marriages between the enriched families, the absence of any standard except wealth—all these things are set down with the minute realism that must come, I am sure, of intimate personal knowledge. Sylvia is the offspring of one such family, and mated to the decadent heir of another. Her tragedy is that too late she meets a man whom she supposes capable of giving her the fuller, more complete life for which she has always ignorantly yearned. Then there is Anne, the penniless girl, hired as a child to be a play fellow for Sylvia, who herself loves the same man, and dies when his dawning affection is ruthlessly swept away from her by the dominant personality of Sylvia. A tale, one might call it, of unhappy women; not made the less grim by the fact that the man for whom they fought is shown as wholly unworthy of such emotion. A powerful, disturbing and highly original story.
"Saki" has been now for a number of years a great delight to me, and his last work, Beasts and Super-Beasts (Lane), is as good as any of its predecessors. Clothed in the elegant garments of Clovis or Reginald, Mr. Munro makes plain to us how lovely this world might be were we only a little bolder about our practical jokes. In the art of introducing bears into the boudoir of a countess or pigs into the study of a diplomat, and then clinching the matter with the wittiest of epigrams, Clovis is supreme. He knows, too, an immense amount about the vengeance that children may take upon their relations, and ladies upon their lady friends. I like him especially when he manoeuvres some stupid but kind-hearted woman into a situation of whose peril she herself is only cloudily aware, while the reader knows all about it. That is the fun of the whole thing. The reader is for ever assisting Clovis and Reginald; in the course of their daring adventures he connives from behind curtains, through key-holes, from ambushes in trees, and always, whilst the poor creature is being harried by wild bows or terrified by menacing kittens, Clovis may be observed, with finger on lip, begging of the intelligent reader that he will not give things away. Of the present collection of stories I like best "A Touch of Realism,"
