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famous men," nor of the sermon on the text, "Many daughters have done virtuously, but thou excellest them all." It was a service that is so recorded in certain hearts as to make words unreal. Certainly never in the long centuries had the Missal of the Foundress known such triumphant woe.

But the meeting in the great School Hall was a different matter. There the girls were free. The head of the school, her hair up, a new and unstable venture, addressed the girls from beside the Faun of Praxiteles, and spoke freely, holding in her large red hands (for she was still in that stage) a tennis racket. "Order," said she, "and if Janet Pickleback doesn't stop making that noise she goes out; and you too, Elsie. I won't have anyone in the tournament who doesn't listen. Now we have thought of some sort of a memorial for, for, you know. It is like this. Everyone has to give something, from a shilling up to anything, The Contemporary Review.

and people outside are going to give too-Janet Pickleback, leave the hall, hop-and that will give the school & hospital scholarship forever and ever. Please don't snuffle down the hall. Snuffling's nonsense. No, I'm not snuffling, Elsie Bodkin. Well, as I was saying, we will have a Tablet in the chapel, with just this on it: the names and all that, and underneath" (she read it out of a piece of crumpled paper) "just this:

"AMOR VINCIT OMNIA."

Then the mourners came back, and old Miss Grain-"Barley" was her nickname dismissed the school. The tennis tournament had been fixed for that Saturday, and it took place. But "Barley" spent the afternoon in the chapel with the Missal in her hands. As she sat there she heard her Goddess singing. "Amor Vincit Omnia; yes, even death." And the school had found its soul.

A SURPRISE PARTY.

"Five-and-thirty wounded Tommies coming to tea and one of them coming to his death, but he doesn't know it," moaned Emily, and waved a knife round her head.

I saw what had happened. All this bun-baking and cake-making had been too much for my poor wife. She had been living in the oven for a week.

"You're overdone. Lie down and try to get a little nap before they come," I said soothingly. "Everything's ready."

"Will he die without a sound or will he gurgle?" said Emily, and brought the knife within an inch of my nose.

"No one is going to die at our teaparty, dear," I said, and ducked.

"Not after swallowing that?" shrieked

J. E. G. de Montmorency.

Emily, and lunged at me with the knife again.

I got it firmly by the handle this time, and I recognized Emily's special cake knife, an instrument wrought to perfection by long years of service, sharp as a razor down both sides, with a flexible tip that slithered round a basin and scooped up the last morsels of candied peel.

But the flexible tip was gone. I understood Emily's distraught condition. You can replace a diamond tiara; money won't buy a twentyyear-old cake-knife.

"Try and bear it, dear," I said. Emily pointed to the table weighed down with Madeiras and rocks and almonds and sultanas and gingers. "It's inside one of them," she said.

For the moment I failed to grasp her meaning. She explained. "I've made six dozen. The knife was all right when I started; a little bent, nothing more. It was when I was mixing the last that I noticed the tip was missing."

There

It was a difficult position. was no time to submit the cakes to the X-rays; the advance party was streaming through the gate.

"Dear fellows! I wonder which one it will be," said Emily, and clung round my neck.

I put her on one side. "I'll manage it; leave it to me," I said, and went forward and welcomed our guests. My mind was working clearly and rapidly, as it always does in a crisis. When I had got them seated round the tea-table, "My dear friends," I said, "this isn't a Christmas party, but my

Punch.

I

wife couldn't help indulging in a little Christmas fun. She's just whispered to me that she's put a surprise in one of the cakes. I know her. It won't be an ordinary sort of surprise. should advise you all to keep a sharp lookout. There's a pound" (it was worth a pound to save a hero's throat from being cut) "for the man who finds anything in his cake which hasn't any business to be there."

Within five minutes two pebbles, a tin-tack, a chunk of wood and a black-beetle were on the tablecloth.

"Do you know that flutter's cost me five pounds, and there wasn't a sign of your infernal knife after all?" I said to Emily when they'd gone.

"I've just found it under the kitchen table," said Emily. "I am thankful."

BOOKS AND AUTHORS.

Few of the season's novels have been waited for with such interest as Ernest Poole's. "His Family" promises to be as successful as "The Harbor," though perhaps with a slightly different public. Sociological problems are decidedly less prominent, though the author is still keenly alive to them. The plot moves within a more contracted circle, both of incidents and individuals, and readers whose chief enjoyment of "The Harbor" was in its striking episodes may find this tame by comparison. But the character drawing is more intimate, and there is a gain both in reality and concentrated impression. Oddly enough, there is at times a suggestion of Mr. W. L. George, though the temper and purpose of the two men are so unlike. In "His Family," Mr. Poole describes the experiences of a New York business man of the older type, as he watches

"guides" would be too strong a word— the unconscious shaping and development by modern conditions of his three daughters: Edith, absorbed in her children almost at the expense of her husband; Deborah, devoted to work among tenement-house children and divided between their claims and that of a long-time lover; and Laura, gay, frivolous and fascinating, with a disquieting likeness to her father in the far-away and brief period of his reckless youth. The story opens with Laura's abrupt announcement to her father of her engagement, and the greater part of it is occupied with marriage and its effect on the modern woman's ideals and opportunities, as noted by a shrewd and affectionate observer. "God knows I've tried to be modern," says Roger Gale to Deborah, his dearest daughter. "Downright modern. Have I asked you to give up

your career?. Not at all. I've asked you to marry Baird, and go right on with him in your work. And if you can't marry Allan Baird, after what he has done for you, how in God's name can you modern women ever marry anyone?" The Macmillan Co.

Still another member of the Kingsley family takes up the novelist's pen. "Bindweed," which Gabrielle Vallings, a grand-niece of Charles Kingsley, dedicates to her cousin Lucas Malet is a book far above the level of everyday fiction and well worth reading. Its principal characters are on the operatic stage, in Paris or London, but in effective contrast in the background is a group of simple farmers, preserving many of the peasant traditions. Eugénie Massini the heroine, is a young dressmaker, living in an out-of-theway corner of Paris, ignorant that she is of illegitimate birth and noble Italian blood, and brought up with the utmost strictness by a hard-working aunt of Breton stock, who guards her with passionate bitterness against such disaster as wrecked her mother's life. Her beautiful voice attracts the attention at once of an experienced and kindly woman who trains singers for the stage, and of a young tenor who has a fancy for masquerading as a strolling musician, and the two influences-sometimes in accord and sometimes at cross purposes-shape her career. In Eugénie, the novelist has drawn with rare skill and delicacy a young girl, convent-taught, austerely fine and sweet, and yet natural and winning. Of a totally different type is Wanda Panowska, the unscrupulous coquette whose temperament gives the book its title, to whose "Tosca" Gascon Hippolyte plays "Mario" and who nearly ruins his life. The story fills nearly four hundred closely-printed pages, and is of such absorbing interest that it will scarcely occur to the

reader to class it as a "problem novel." But the writer undoubtedly means it as a contribution to the solving of one of the most vexed of modern questions, and her solution is a thoroughly conservative one. Dodd, Mead & Co.

The plot of Mrs. Edith Wharton's "Summer" is based on the one figure in literary geometry which is simpler than the triangle, the inclined plane. Charity Royall, ignorant, stubborn, passionate, sits at the top in one of those pathetic New England villages which are little more than pools of stagnant life left behind by a receding tide. She has always held aloof from the stolidity about her, and when Lucius Harney suddenly appears at the bottom, wrapped in the splendor of the city, she slides quickly and gladly into his arms. For a few months she is gloriously and unrepentantly happy. Then fear and shame come, and she is glad to take refuge in a marriage with a moody and taciturn old lawyer who has been her guardian since childhood. She seems to recognize that her blossoming-time is over, and is content to wither slowly for the rest of her life. "Summer" is perhaps a shade more perfunctory than Mrs. Wharton's other work, too much preoccupied with the outer trappings of life, yet it reveals the same cool, sure touch, the mastery of picture and incident, and her peculiar knack of giving quick glimpses of the very depths of a soul. The scene of the burial on the Mountain, built of the splendid solemnity of the service and the squalid profanity of the snarling knot of gipsies, is as memorable a chapter as she has ever written. It would seem a greater book if "Tess" and "Anna Karenina" had not preceded it. Mrs. Wharton is, after all, an etcher rather than a worker in oils, and a Meryon rather than a Whistler or a Rembrandt. D. Appleton & Co.

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