Officer (to trooper, whom he has recently had occasion to reprimand severely). "Why did you not salute?"
Trooper. "I thocht me an' you wisna' on speakin' ter-rms the noo."
OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
I confess that I was at first a little alarmed by the title of Friendly Russia (Fisher Unwin). A book with a name like that, with, moreover, an "introduction"—and one by no less a person than Mr. H. G. Wells—seemed to threaten ponderous things, maps probably, and statistics and unpronounceable towns. Never was there a greater mistake. What Mr. Denis Garstin has put into his entertaining pages is simply the effect produced by a previously unknown country upon the keen and receptive mind of a young man who is fortunately able to translate his impressions into vigorous and picturesque language. I have met few travel books so unpretentious, none that gives more vividly the feeling of "going there onself" that must be the final test of success. The last few years have made a happy change in the popular English conception of Russia. Even before the War, our old melodramatic idea, that jumble of bombs and spies and sledge-hunting wolves, had begun to give place to a slightly apologetic admiration. Now, of course, we are all Russophil; but for the understanding proper to that love there can be no better introduction than Mr. Garstin's pleasant book. Spend with him a happy summer by the waters of the Black Sea; share, along with his humous, his appreciation of that life of contented simplicity, where easy-going and hospitable families are rules by the benevolent despotism of equally easy-going domestics (O knouts, O servitude!), where the casual caller "drops in" for a month or more, and where everyone knows everything about everybody and nobody minds. By way of contrast to this, the latter part of the book contains, in "Russia at War," some chapters of an ever closer appeal. You will read here, not unmoved, of how that terrible week of suspense came upon the soul of a people, of the fusion of all discordant factions into one army intent only upon the Holy War. There is encouragement and a heartening certainty of triumph in this that should be an unfailing remedy for pessimism.
None of your confounded subtleties and last cries in Mrs. Latham's Extravagance (Chapman and Hall). An unvarnished tale, rather, fashioned according to the naïve method of simple enumeration and bald assertion, with such subsidiary trifles as characterisation left to the discretion and imaginative capacity of the reader. Christopher Sheffield, and artist, post-cubist brand, married his model, a dipsomaniac as it happened. Whereupon he implored Katherine to share his life, which, to keep him from going down-hill, she very generously did, it being explicitly understood that she was to have the reversion of Mrs. Sheffield's marriage lines. Christopher, however, becomes infatuated with the widow Latham—who had married a rich old gentleman for his money, while in love with Lord Ronald Eckington, then the penniless fourth son of a marquis, now the celebrated and well-paid photographer, "Mr. Lestocq"—so that when Sheffield's model wife dies, he, instead of doing the right thing by Katherine, suggests settling the matter on a basis of five-hundred or (at a push) five-fifty a year. Naturally she draws herself up very cold and proud and refuses the compensation. And then, with
