one thanked Dr. Peterson for rising
(if he might) to express a few words of thanks to Dr. Wilkes.

Anticipating this possibility, Dr. Peterson devoted the larger part of his
speech to thanking himself.

* * * * *

[Illustration: _Grannie._ "AND WIT'S THE MATTER WI' ME RIGHT LEG, DOCTOR?"

_Doctor._ "OH, JUST OLD AGE, MRS. MACDOUGALL."

_Grannie._ "HOOTS, MAN; YE'RE HAVERIN'. THE LEFT LEG'S HALE AND SOOND, AND
THEY'RE _BAITH_ THE SAME AGE."]

* * * * *

OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

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

To read _An Englishman Looks at the World_ (CASSELL), a collection of
"unrestrained remarks on contemporary matters"--aeroplanes, CHESTERTON and
BELLOC, libraries, labour unrest, the Great State, and the like--by Mr. H.
G. WELLS, is to be delighted or infuriated according to your natural habit
of mind. If established in tolerable comfort in a world which you judge,
for all its blemishes, to be on the whole rather well run, you will resent
exceedingly this pert young man (for Mr. WELLS is still astonishingly
young) with his preposterous eagerness, his insane passion for questioning
and tinkering and most unfairly putting you and your kind in the wrong. You
will no doubt find excellent grounds for doubting his ability to
reconstruct; for suspecting what you will feel to be his pretentious
breadth of view, his assumed omniscience. But if, on the other hand,
thinking life in your sombre moments a nightmare of imbecility and in your
more expansive moments a high adventure of immeasurable possibilities, you
are straitened between cold despairs and immense hopes, you will readily
forgive this irreverent, self-confident critic-journalist any crude things
he may have said in his haste for sake of his flashes of perception, his
happily descriptive phrases, his inspiring anticipations, his uncalculating
candour, and above all his generous preoccupation with things that matter
enormously. "What we prosperous people who have nearly all the good things
of life and most of the opportunities have to do now is to justify
ourselves." That is a sentiment and a challenge repeated or implied
throughout the book. This Englishman looking at his world looks with quick
eyes. He is himself so intensely interested that he can only fail to
interest such as find his whole attitude an outrage upon their finally
adopted convictions and conventions.

* *