The whole cast was excellent, and Sir GEORGE ALEXANDER must be felicitated on a very clever production.  But it is to author and heroine that I beg to offer the best of my gratitude for a most refreshing evening.

O.S.

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    “You will find that the men most likely to get off the note
    are those who never really got on to it.”—­Musical Times.

The real question is how those who never got on to the note contrive to get off it.

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[Illustration:  Mother (reading paper).  “I SEE A BAKER’S BEEN FINED TEN POUNDS FOR SELLING BREAD LESS THAN TWELVE HOURS OLD.”

Alan (who now goes to school by train—­joining in).  “OH, THINK!  AND HE MIGHT HAVE PULLED THE CORD AND STOPPED THE TRAIN TWICE FOR THAT!”]

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OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

(BY MR. PUNCH’S STAFF OF LEARNED CLERKS.)

When I first read the title of Secret Bread (HEINEMANN) my idea was—­well, what would anyone naturally think but that here was a romance of food-hoarding, a tale of running the potato blockade and the final discovery of a hidden cellar full of fresh rolls?  But of course I was quite wrong.  The name has nothing to do with food, other than mental; it stands for the sustaining idea (whatever it is) that each one of us keeps locked in his heart as the motive of his existence.  With Ishmael Ruan, the hero of Miss F. TENNYSON JESSE’S novel, this hidden motive was love of the old farm-house hall of Cloom, and a wish to hand it on, richer, to his son. Ishmael inherited Cloom himself because, though the youngest of a large family, he was the only one born in wedlock.  Hence the second theme of the story, the jealousy between Ishmael and Archelaus, the elder illegitimate brother.  How, through the long lives of both, this enmity is kept up, and the frightful vengeance that ends it, make an absorbing and powerful story.  The pictures of Cornish farm-life also are admirably done—­though I feel bound to repeat my conviction that the time is at hand when, for their own interest, our novelists will have to proclaim what one might call a close time for pilchards.  Still, Miss JESSE has written an unusually clever book, full of vigour and passion, of which the interest never flags throughout the five-hundred-odd closely-printed pages that carry its protagonists from the early sixties almost to the present day.  No small achievement.

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