and you, if you are like me, hide a yawn and say, “No, really?” There is a breezy carelessness, too, about his methods which kills a story.  He distinctly states, for instance, that the story of the “Headless Cat of No. ——­, Lower Seedley Street, Manchester,” was told to him by a Mr. ROBERT DANE.  In the first half of the narrative this gentleman’s brother-in-law addresses him as Jack, and later on his wife says to him, “Oh, Edward.”  What a man whose own Christian name is so much a matter of opinion has to say about seeing headless cats does not seem to me to be evidence.

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There seems to be an increasing public for the volume of reflections.  At all events Mr. REGINALD LUCAS, who has already two or three successes in this kind to his credit, has been encouraged to produce another, to which he has given the pleasant title of The Measure of our Thoughts (HUMPHREYS).  It is, of course, difficult to be critical with a book like this; either it pleases the reader or it doesn’t, and that is about all that can be said.  One reason for my belief that Mr. LUCAS’s Thoughts will please is that he has put them into the brain of a definitely conceived and very well drawn character.  They are told in the form of letters by this character to his old tutor.  The writer is supposed to be the rather unattractive and self-conscious eldest son of a noble house, who suffers from the presence of a father and sister who think him a fool, and a brother whose charm is a continual and painful contrast to his own lack of it.  The special skill of the letters is their self-revelation, which brings out the pathos of the writer’s position, while at the same time showing quite clearly the defects that explained it.  Mr. LUCAS, in short, does not commit the error of making his hero merely a mute, misunderstood paragon, whom anyone with common penetration must have recognised as such.  On the contrary, we sympathise with him, especially in the big tragedy of his life, while quite admitting that to any casual acquaintance he must have appeared only a dull and uninteresting egoist.  This I call clever, because it shows that Mr. LUCAS has created a real thinker, rather than striven to give him any unusual profundity of thought.  An agreeable book.

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In the sixteenth chapter of the First Part of The Rocks of Valpre (FISHER UNWIN) Trevor Mordaunt married Christine Wyndham, and on the last page (which is the 511th) of the book, “she opened to him the doors of her soul, and drew him within....”  Granted that Mordaunt, with the eyes of steel, was not exactly an oncoming man and that when he married Christine he received, as wedding presents, two or three brothers-in-law who sponged hopelessly upon him, I still think that Miss ETHEL DELL has given us too detailed an account of the domestic differences between Mordaunt and his wife.  For my own