adam, as bald and flat
as a mirror--a beetle couldn't have hidden himself on it. (I had to call
this a hard tennis-court for the sake of appearances. We do as a matter
of fact play on it sometimes.) But it had no effect on the corncrake. Of
course the truth is that I never have the least idea where he is; no one
has. No one has over seen him or ever will. He is endowed with great
ventriloquial powers. That is a provision of Nature, and if you will
reflect a moment you will see that it must be so. For, granted that he
is to go on talking like that, if he could not throw his voice about
from place to place and thus make it impossible to get at him, the
species would become extinct.

There is nothing more that I can do, and it is only fair to admit that
the whole thing is my own fault. When I built my house six years ago I
might have shown a little common foresight in this matter. I got
everything else right as far as I could. My rooms are well placed for
sunshine and they have the best of the view. The water-supply is good;
there is plenty of fall for the drainage system; we are well out of the
motor dust. But I omitted one precaution. I should have had the ground
surveyed for corncrakes.

* * * * *

[Illustration: _Hotel Waiter._ "Come, sir, you really must go off to
bed, Sir." (_Yawns_). "Why, the dawn's a-breaking, Sir."

_Late Reveller._ "Let it break--and put it down in the bill, waiter."]

* * * * *

OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

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

In _The World Set Free_ (Macmillan) Mr. H. G. Wells has seen a
vision--the vision of a world plunged into blazing and crumbling chaos
by the ultimate logical issues of military violence. Defence, becoming
always less and less effective against attack, which is always more and
more a matter of the laboratory, finally succumbs before _Holsten's_
discovery of "Carolinum" and its final disastrous application in the
"atomic bombs." Romancing on a theme out of Soddy's _Interpretation of
Radium_, Mr. Wells, with those deft strokes of allusive and imaginative
realism--so convincing is he that realism is the only apt word for his
daring constructions of the future--depicts the shattering of the
headquarters of the War Control in Paris, followed by a swift
counterstroke against the Central European Control in Berlin by the
aviation corps, the destruction of capital after capital, and the final