[Illustration:  Trainer (to Irish apprentice who has finished among the “also ran").  “WHY DIDN’T YOU HANG ON TO THE FAVOURITE?  DIDN’T I TELL YOU YOU WERE THE ONLY ONE HE WAS AFRAID OF.”

Apprentice. “THAT’S JUST IT, SORR.  ’TWAS THE WAY HE WAS SO AFRAID OF ME, WHIN WE CAME INTO THE STRAIGHT, HE JUST FLED AWAY FROM ME.”]

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OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

(By Mr. Punch’s Staff of Learned Clerks.)

Those who appreciate the short story of quality will be pleasantly stirred by the announcement of Island Tales (MILLS AND BOON), a posthumous volume containing what is probably the last writing of the late JACK LONDON.  I can say at once that these seven stories show his art in one aspect of its best.  Not here the LONDON, whom some of us might prefer, of the strenuous adventure-tale, with whom there was no respite till, at the end of anything up to a hundred sinew-cracking pages, we won through to the appointed end.  That South Sea atmosphere, so insidiously appealing to the literary temperament (from STEVENSON to STACPOOLE you can see it at work) has steeped these tales in the lotus-leisure of perpetual afternoon, so that the action of them tends to become overlaid by slow reflective talk, old memories and the sense of ancient things.  Most notable is this in the first, where the actual romance, quick, human and haunting, does not so much as show its face till after forty pages of old-time local colour.  Perhaps of all the seven I myself would prefer the last—­“The Kanaka Surf,” a slight intrigue, but a perfect epic of such bathing as, I suppose, can be understood nowhere but on these enchanted coasts.  To read it is to realise what a loss we suffer in one who could put such jewelled loveliness on to the printed page—­and what another loss in not seeing the original for ourselves.  I suppose no tribute to the power of genius could be more eloquent.

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After the German Revolution of 1918, KARL KAUTSKY, a prominent Socialist, was appointed by the new Government to examine and edit the documents in the Berlin Foreign Office relating to the outbreak of the War.  His work was completed in time for the Peace Conference and would, he believes, if published at that time, have convinced the Allies that the new German Government ought not to be made responsible for the sins of the old one.  But it would also have shown that the old Government was the main instigator of the War, and that the German people, having danced to the tune, even if they did not call for it, deserved to pay the piper.  For that reason, perhaps, the German Government withheld Herr KAUTSKY’S revelations.  Now he has published them on his own account, under the title, The Guilt of William Hohenzollern (SKEFFINGTON).  A more damning indictment has never been drawn.  From the moment of the ARCHDUKE’S assassination the KAISER and his advisers determined to make it