to them.  The end came to him on October 8th, his twenty-eighth birthday.  His battalion of the Royal West Kent Regiment was engaged in making a series of bombing attacks.  In one of these ARTHUR HEATH was shot through the neck and fell.  “He spoke once,” Professor MURRAY tells us, “to say, ‘Don’t trouble about me,’ and died almost immediately.”  His Platoon Sergeant wrote to his parents, “A braver man never existed,” and with that epitaph we may leave him.

* * * * *

The scenes of A Sheaf of Bluebells (HUTCHINSON) are laid in Normandy, where they speak the French language.  But the Baroness ORCZY does not take advantage of this local habit, and is careful not to put too heavy a strain upon the intelligence of those who do not enjoy the gift of tongues. “Ma tante,” “Mon cousin,” “Enfin"—­these are well within the range of all of us.  Indeed, though I shrink from boasting, I could easily have borne it if she had tried me a little higher. “Ma tante,” for instance, got rather upon my nerves before the heroine had finished with it.  The plot (early nineteenth century) is concerned with one Ronnay de Maurel, a soldier and admirer of NAPOLEON, and in consequence anathema to most of his own family.  The heroine was betrothed to Ronnay’s half-brother, as elegant and royalist as Ronnay was uncouth and Napoleonic.  It is a tale of love and intrigue for idle hours, the kind of thing that the Baroness does well; and, though she has done better before in this vein, you will not lack for excitement here; and possibly, as I did, you will sometimes smile when strictly speaking you ought to have been serious.

* * * * *

“Economy, I hate the word!” said a much-harassed housekeeper recently:  echoing, I fear, the sentiments of the great majority of the British people.  Nevertheless, let no one be deterred by a somewhat forbidding title from reading Mr. HENRY HIGGS’S National Economy:  An Outline of Public Administration (MACMILLAN).  Although written by a Treasury official—­a being who in popular conception is compounded of red-tape and sealing-wax and spends his life in spoiling the Ship of State by saving halfpennyworths of tar—­it is not a dry-as-dust treatise on the art of scientific parsimony, but a lively plea for wise expenditure.  Mr. HIGGS is no believer in the dictum that the best thing to do with national resources is to leave them to fructify in the pockets of the taxpayers—­“doubtful soil,” in his opinion; nor is he afraid that heavy taxation will kill the goose with the golden eggs.  It may be “one of those depraved birds which eat their own eggs, in which case, if its eggs cannot be trapped, killing is all it is fit for.”  The author is full of well-thought-out suggestions for saving waste and increasing efficiency in our national administration.  The introduction of labour-saving machinery, the elimination of superfluous officials, the reduction of the necessary drudgery which too often blights the initiative and breaks the hearts of our young civil servants—­all these and many other reforms are advocated in Mr. HIGGS’S most entertaining pages.  I cordially commend them to the attention of everyone who takes an intelligent interest in public affairs, not excluding Cabinet Ministers, Members of Parliament, and political journalists.