* * * * *

Bim, Bom, Boom!!!  Clang, Cling, Clang!!!  What are those hands tugging at the ropes, swinging the Bells big and little, evoking the stormy clashes and soothing cadences of the Chimes?

Surely those of the youthful New Year himself!  An echo from the long-silent lips of the great Christmas-glorifier and lover of poor humanity seemed to ring in Punch’s ears:—­

“Who hears in us, the Chimes, one note bespeaking disregard, or stern regard, of any hope, or joy or pain, or sorrow, of the many-sorrowed throng; who hears us make response to any creed that gauges human passions and affections, as it gauges the amount of miserable food on which humanity may pine and wither, does us wrong!”

“Right you are!” cried Punch, cordially, Toby yapping assent.

He might have said more, but the Bells, the dear familiar Bells, his own dear constant, steady friends, the Chimes, began to ring the joy-peals for a New Year so lustily, so merrily, so happily, so gaily, that he (like poor old Trotty Veck) leapt to his feet, and broke the spell that bound him.

* * * * *

“Yes, that is still the true Spirit of the Chimes,” mused Mr. Punch, as he took pen in hand to open up his new Volume.  “And that’s the spirit I hope to keep up right through the twelve months of just-born Eighteen Hundred and Ninety-two, which I trust may be—­with my willing assistance,

A HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL OF YOU!!!”

* * * * *

OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

One of the Baron’s Critical Faculty sends him his opinion of our Mr. DU MAURIER’s latest novel, which is also his first.  And here let it be published urbi et orbi that there is no truth whatever in a report which appeared in an evening paper to the effect that Mr. DU MAURIER, however retiring he may be, was about to retire or had retired from Mr. Punch’s Staff.  The St. James’s Gazette has already “authoritatively” denied the assertion; and this denial the Baron for Mr. Punch, decisively confirms.  Now, to the notice of the book above-mentioned.  Here it is:—­

[Illustration]

“There has been a certain deliberateness in Mr. DU MAURIER’s incursion into literature that speaks eloquently for his modesty.  He is, to our certain knowledge, at least 40 years old, and Peter Ibbetson, which Messrs. OSGOOD & CO. present in two daintily dressed volumes, is his first essay in romantic writing.  Reading the book, it is hard to conceive this to be the fact.  The work is entirely free from those traces of amateurishness, almost inseparable from a first effort.  The literary style is considerably above the average modern novelist; the plot is marked by audacious invention, worked out with great skill; the hero is a madman, not in itself an attractive arrangement, but there is such