These Mayors lead a life full of variety.

* * * * *

[Illustration: PLEASURES OF THE POINT TO POINT.

_Good and encouraging Samaritan_ (_helping sportsman to remount after
immersion in the brook_). "NEXT OLD BRUCK BE HEAPS BIGGER'N THIS UN, AND HE
DO HAVE A TURRIBLE LOT O' WATER IN HE JUST NOW."]

* * * * *

OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

(_By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks._)

_Dodo the Second_ (HODDER AND STOUGHTON), by E. F. BENSON. Doesn't the very
title-page sound like a leaf from your dead past? I protest that for my own
part I was back on hearing it in the naughty nineties, the very beginning
of them indeed (the fact that I was also back in the school-room did little
to impair the thrill) and agog to read the clever, audacious book that all
the wonderful people who lived in those days were talking about. And
behold! here they all are again--not the people who talked, but the
audacious characters. Only the trouble is that we have all in the interval
become so much more audacious ourselves that their efforts in this kind
seem to fail to produce the old impression. This is by no means to say that
I didn't enjoy _Dodo the Second_. I enjoyed it very much indeed; and so
will you. For one thing, it was the jolliest experience to recognize so
many old friends--_Dodo_ herself (now of course the _Princess Waldenech_),
and the wicked _Prince_, and the rest of them. Of _Dodo_ at least it may be
said, moreover, that she has matured credibly; this middle-aging lady is
exactly what the siren of twenty years ago would have developed into, still
beautiful, still alluring, and still (I must add) capable of infecting
everyone else in a conversation with exactly her own trick of cheap and
rather fatiguing brilliance. Added to all this there is now a new
generation of characters, several of whom are quite pleasant company; for
them and for one very impressive piece of descriptive work in the account
of a gathering storm, this Twenty Years After may be heartily welcomed.
Indeed one leaves _Dodo_ of 1914 so vigorously alive that I am not without
hope of her turning up yet again as a grandmother in 1934.

* * * * *

I have discovered from _The Rebellion of Esther_ (ALSTON RIVERS) why it is
that my sympathies, usually at the disposal of insurgents, are withheld
from the Suffragette. Anyone who is genuinely out to assert a principle, at
t