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From a club journal:—­

    “Members will look forward to the River Trip this year as a
    change from a Trip to the River.”

This constant craving for variety is one of the most unhealthy symptoms of the times in which we live.

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From a report of the debate on the National Shipyards:—­

    “’The Mercantile Marine was our weakest front.  If the sinking
    increased our unbiblical cord would be cut’ (a graphic phrase
    this).”—­Provincial Paper.

Graphic, perhaps, but hardly stenographic.

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[Illustration:  Poacher (to gamekeeper who has been chasing him for twenty minutes). “NOW, SONNY, IF YOU’VE ’AD A GOOD REST WE’LL SET OFF AGAIN.”]

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OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

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

MR. E.F.  BENSON, seizing occasion as it flies, has given us, in Across the Stream (MURRAY), a story on the very topical subject of spiritualism and communication with the dead.  As a practised novelist, with a touch so sure that it can hardly fail to adorn, he has made a tale that is interesting throughout and here and there aspires to real beauty of feeling; though not all the writer’s skill can disguise a certain want of unity in the natural and supernatural divisions of his theme.  The early part of the book, which tells of the boyhood of Archie and the attempts of his dead brother Martin to “get through” to him, are admirably done.  As always in these studies of happy and guarded childhood, Mr. BENSON is at his best, sympathetic, tender, altogether winning.  There was lung trouble in Archie’s record—­Martin indeed had died of it (sometimes I wonder whether any of Mr. BENSON’S protagonists can ever be wholly robust), and there is a genuine thrill in the scene at the Swiss sanatorium, where the dead and living boys touch hands over the little cache of childish treasure buried by the former beneath a pine-tree in the garden.  Later, when Archie had recovered from his disease and grown to suitor’s estate, I could not but feel, despite the sardonically observed figure of Helena, the detestable girl who nearly ruins him, that the whole affair had become conventional, and by so much lost interest for its creator.  Apart, however, from the bogie chapters of Possession (which I shall not further indicate) the most moving scenes in this latter part are those between Archie and his father.  I have seldom known a horrible situation handled with more delicate art; it is for this, rather than for its slightly unconvincing devilments, that I would give the book an honourable place in the ranks of Bensonian romance.

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