European and native intrigue, showing how one section of the populace strove as usual to ease the white man’s burden by flirtation and gossip, and the other to get the best for themselves by unlimited roguery and chicane.  The whole thing culminates in a trial scene which is at once a delightful entertainment and (I should suppose) a shrewdly observed study of the course of Anglo-Burmese justice.  I think I would have chosen that Mr. LOWIS should base his fun on something a little less grim than the murder and mutilation of a European, or at least Eurasian, lady, even though the very slight part in the action played by Mrs. Rodrigues, when alive, could hardly be called sympathetic.  Still we were all so good-humoured over her taking-off that for a long time I cherished a rather dream-like faith in her reappearance to prove that this attitude had been justified.  Not that Mr. LOWIS has not every right to retort that he is writing comedy rather than farce; certainly he has made his four blind mice to run in highly diverting fashion, very entertaining to those of us who see how they run; and as they at least save their tails triumphantly it would perhaps be ungenerous to complain about one that doesn’t.

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[Illustration:  Damsel. “OH, PROFESSOR, CAN YOU PROVIDE ME WITH A LOVE-POTION?  MY MOTHER SAYS IF I WED NOT SOON I MUST E’EN GO FORTH TO EARN MY LIVING.”

Alchemist. “THAT I CAN, MADAM, AND OF TWO KINDS.  FIRST, THE SLOW-WORKING PURPLE SORT IS VERILY CHEAP, BUT DIFFICULT OF ADMINISTRATION; FOR IN WATER IT IS PLAINLY VISIBLE AND EASY OF DISCERNMENT IN TEA.  WHEREAS MY PATENT POTION, BRINGING LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT, CLOSELY RESEMBLETH THE MUCH-DESIRED WHISKY.  THIS SORT IS ONE GUINEA PER TOT.”]

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The Story of the Fourth Army in the Battles of the Hundred Days (HODDER AND STOUGHTON) is printed on pages the size of a copy of Punch, and with its accompanying case of maps it costs eighteen-pence to go through the post.  It boasts a hundred full-page photographs, also sketches, charts, maps, panoramas and diagrams ad lib., a foreword by General Lord RAWLINSON and ten appendices; so really it seems that the much-abused word “sumptuous” may for once be fairly applied.  The author, Major-General Sir A. MONTGOMERY, who himself helped to “stage” the battles he writes about, has built up a record which is in some sense unique, for I think it is possible from this book to trace precisely where any unit of the Fourth Army was placed, and what doing, at any given hour during the whole of the victory march from Amiens to the Belgian frontier.  Apart from anything else it is pleasant to have a book that deals only with the days of victory; but it must be admitted that, to gain a completeness of detail so entirely satisfactory to those most nearly concerned, the writer has had to sacrifice something of human interest, for