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[Illustration:  Cinema Photographer.  “WOULD YOU MIND DOING THAT BIT AGAIN?  I FORGOT TO TURN THE HANDLE.”]

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OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

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

A book of little novels, or long-shorts, from the pen of Mr. ROBERT HICHENS, will be welcomed with pleasure by a very large public. Snake-Bite (CASSELL) contains a half-dozen various tales, all but one of which are eminently characteristic of their author.  It sounds unkind to add that this one is for artistry the best of the bunch; but I mean no more than that Mr. HICHENS has here done very well a slight and delicate sketch of a style not generally associated with his work.  In the name-piece his admirers will find themselves on more familiar ground—­none other indeed than that well-known desert in which they have enjoyed such delicious thrills in the same company already.  When Mr. HICHENS’ characters get the sand in their eyes almost anything may be expected of them.  Here he has given us a new version of the ancient scheme of two men and a woman, complicated in this instance by a cobra; the problem being, whether a doctor should cure his wife’s lover of a snake-bite.  More original is the longest story in the collection, one called “The Lost Faith,” an affair of mental healing and love and crime too complex for compression.  It is admirably told.  It leads up to a situation as novel as it is dramatic—­the confession of a young fanatic, who believes in a lady-healer so implicitly that he puts typhoid germs into the drink of a celebrated general in order to provide her with an impressive subject.  As a sensation this wants some beating; though it failed to shake my own preference for the other story, which you will observe I have purposely left unnamed.  You will, I hope, enjoy finding it for yourself.

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Heritage (COLLINS) gives me much the same impression that one obtains from the spectacle of a man wire-walking in a sack or painting pictures with his toes—­attempting, in short, any task under conditions of the greatest possible handicap.  That certainly is what Miss V. SACKVILLE-WEST has been at pains to impose upon herself.  With a straightforward, simple and interesting tale and some considerable gifts for reproducing character, she has deliberately sacrificed these advantages by telling her story in the most roundabout and awkward manner imaginable.  The theme is the influence of heredity, as shown in the working out of a strain of Spanish blood in a Sussex peasant stock, the victims of this inconvenient blend being Ruth and the young cousin whom half-unwillingly she marries; with devastating results. Ruth, as I say, was attracted to Westmacott with only part of her being; the better (or at least less Spanish) elements in her were employed in making soft eyes at two other men, one