JUST FLED AWAY FROM ME."]

* * * * *

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.

* * * * *

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 Willi