* * * * *

In the series of “Chap” books which is emerging from The Bodley Head I have no doubt that Canada Chaps will be welcome.  I hope, however, that Mrs. SIME will not mind my saying that the best of her tales are those which have more to do with Canada than its “chaps.”  Her stories of fighting and of fighters seem to me to have a note in them that does not ring quite true.  It is just the difference between the soldier telling his own artless and rugged tale and someone else telling it for him with a touch of artifice.  But when the author merely uses the War as her background she writes with real power.  The straining for effect vanishes, and so little do the later stories resemble the earlier that I should not have guessed that they were written by the same hand.  “Citoyenne Michelle” and “The King’s Gift,” for instance, are true gems, and they are offered to you at the price of paste.  Nowhere will you find a better bargain for your shilling.

* * * * *

HELEN MACKAY, in A Journal of Small Things (MELROSE), sets before us with, it might seem, almost too deliberate simplicity of idiom little scenes and remembered reflections of her days in France since the July of the terrible year.  An American to whom France has come to be her adopted and most tenderly loved foster-country, she tells of little things, chiefly sad little things, seen in the hospitals she served or by the wayside or in the houses of the simple and the great, shadowed alike by the all-embracing desolation of the War.  The writer has a singular power of selecting the significant details of an incident, and a delicate sensitiveness to beauty and to suffering which gives distinction to this charming book.  Less happy perhaps and much less in the picture are the episodes learnt only at second hand and suggesting the technique and unreality of the imagined short story.

* * * * *

[Illustration:  THE PRICELESS PLUMBER—­AN INCIDENT OF LAST WEEK’S THAW.

Troubled Householder (writing). “THERE IS A SLIGHT LEAKAGE IN ONE OF OUR WATER-PIPES.  KINDLY PUT MY NAME DOWN AS A HUMBLE CANDIDATE FOR YOUR ESTEEMED SERVICES.”]

* * * * *

ANOTHER IMPENDING APOLOGY.

From a paragraph about Mr. JOHN BUCHAN:—­

    “It is said that he writes his novels as a cure for insomnia.”—­News
    of the World.

* * * * *

THE CENSOR ABROAD.

    “When the High Court is sitting, the Resident Magistrate’s Court is
    held in a room about upteen feet long by about upteen feet
    wide.”—­East African Standard.

* * * * *

    “CURES STOMACH TROUBLE OR MONEY BACK.”—­Advt. in South African Paper.

This “Money Back” seems a new disease.