R.C.L.

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[Illustration:  ECHOES OF THE AIR-RAIDS.

First Souvenir-hunter.  “FOUND ANYFINK, ’ERB?”

Second ditto.  “NO; BUT THAT’LL BE ALL RIGHT.  THEY’RE SURE TO COME AGAIN TERMORRER NIGHT.”]

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OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

(BY MR. PUNCH’S STAFF OF LEARNED CLERKS.)

Not for a great while have I met a story at once so moving and so simply made as Summer (MACMILLAN).  Of course at this time the art of EDITH WHARTON is no new discovery; but to my thinking she has never done better work than this tale of a New England village, and the wakening to love of the girl who was drowsing away her youth there.  It is all, as I say, so simple, and written with such apparent economy of effort, that only afterwards does the amazing cleverness of Mrs. WHARTON’S method impress itself upon the reader. Charity Royall was a waif, of worse than ambiguous parentage, brought up in a community where her passionate and violently sensitive nature was stifled.  Two men loved her—­dour middle-aged Lawyer Royall, whose house she kept, and Lucius Harney, the young visitor from the city, the fairy-prince of poor Charity’s one great romance, through whom came tragedy.  You see already the whole stark simplicity of the theme.  What I cannot convey to you is that secret of Mrs. WHARTON’S that enables her by some exquisitely right word or phrase so to illuminate a scene that you see it as though by an inspiration of your own, and feel that thus and thus did the thing in fact happen.  There are episodes in Summer—­for example the Fourth of July firework evening, or the wildly macabre scene of the night funeral on the mountain—­that seem to me to come as near perfection in their telling as anything I am ever likely to read, and when you have enjoyed them for yourself I fancy you will be inclined to join me in very sincere gratitude for work of such rare quality.

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Those who admired (which is the same as saying those who read) that excellent book, The Retreat from Mons, will be glad to hear that its author, Major A. CORBETT-SMITH, has now continued his record in a further volume, called The Marne and After (CASSELL).  In it you will find all those qualities, a sane and soldier-like common-sense, an entire absence of gush, and a saving humour in the midst of horrors, which made the earlier installment memorable.  Above all else I have been impressed by the first of these characteristics.  Major CORBETT-SMITH writes from the viewpoint of one to whom even this ghastliest of wars is part of the day’s work.  That he sees its human and hideous sides by no means impairs this quiet professional outlook.  I recall one phrase in his chapter on the secret agents of the enemy:  “At the Aisne German spies were a regular plague”—­just