soliloquies or dialogues, mouths begin to gape, and the attention wanders.
Is this sacrilege? If it be, I must be content to be sacrilegious. But
there is scope for careful and graceful acting, and of this the O. U. D. S.
took full advantage.

[Illustration: Teaching him his A. D. C.]

Mr. WHITAKER'S _Valentine_ was a very pleasing performance. He spoke his
lines admirably, grouped himself (if the Hibernianism be permissible)
excellently, and showed himself in every sense a well-graced actor. Mr.
PONSONBY'S _Launce_, too, was capital, carefully thought out and
consistently rendered. One or two of the actors in tights seemed unduly
conscious of their hands and knees, but, on the whole, the acting was of
good average excellence. The Ladies here are real Ladies, not stuffed
imitations, as at Cambridge. Mrs. SIM, Mrs. MORRIS, and Miss FARMER, were
all good. But the one really brilliant performance was that of _Crab_, the
dog, by a wonderful Variety performer from the Theatre Royal, Dogs' Home,
Battersea. If this gorgeously ugly, splendidly intelligent, and
affectionately versatile animal is sent back at the conclusion of the run
of the piece to be asphyxiated at Battersea, I shall never believe in the
gratitude or humanity of the O. U. D. S.

ANOTHER GENTLEMAN.

* * * * *

OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

[Illustration: Timothy's Quest.]

In the arid life of the book-reviewer there is sometimes found the oasis of
opportunity to recommend to a (comparatively) less suffering community a
book worth reading. My Baronite has by chance come upon such an one in
_Timothy's Quest_, by KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN. The little volume is apparently
an importation, having been printed for the Riverside Press, Cambridge,
Mass. It is published in London by GAY AND BIRD, a firm whose name, though
it sounds lively, is as unfamiliar as the Author's. Probably from this
combination of circumstances, _Timothy's Quest_ has, as far as my
Baronite's quest goes, escaped the notice of the English Reviewer. That is
his personal loss. The book is an almost perfect idyl, full of humanity,
fragrant with the smell of flowers, and the manifold scent of meadows. It
tells how _Timothy_, waif and stray in the heart of a great city, escaped
from a baby-farm to whose tender cares he had been committed; how, in a
clothes-basket, mounted on four wooden wheels, cushioned with a dingy
shawl, he wheeled off another waif and stray, a prattling infan