r, in the matter of ability far in advance of either of his
partners, Brown or Brown.

"Dear me," he said, "dear me, dear me! This is very sad, very
sad--very sudden too, very sudden. And what--tut, tut, dear, dear, let
me see--what was the cause of--ah! What was the cause--what was it
that occasioned the--how did your master come to die? Yes, how did
your master come to die?"

* * * * *

"What is it all about?" asks the reader.

Well, it is not quite so meaningless as it may appear; there is method
in the madness; for this is a passage from a story by one of the most
popular English authors in America, to whom an American editor has
offered twenty cents a word. At the present rate of exchange such
commissions are not to be trifled with.

* * * * *

"Wanted, experienced Parlourmaid for a good home, where the
household does not change."--_Local Paper._

Apparently "no washing."

* * * * *
[Illustration _Cheerful Sportsman._ "HULLO, PADRE! I SEE YOUR LATE
COLLEAGUE HAS GONE ON AHEAD."]

* * * * *

OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

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

MR. JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER, for whose work as a novelist I have more
than once expressed high admiration, has now brought together seven
long-short stories under the collective title of _The Happy End_
(HEINEMANN). Lest however this name and the little preface, in which
the writer asserts that his wares "have but one purpose--to give
pleasure," should lead you to expect that species of happy ending in
which Jack shall have Jill and naught shall go ill, I think a word of
warning may not be wasted. In only three of the tales is the finish
a matter of conventional happiness. Elsewhere you have a deserted
husband, who has tracked his betrayer to a nigger saloon in Atlantic
City, wrested from his purpose of murder by a revivalist hymn; a young
lad, having avenged the destruction of his home, returning to his
widowed mother to await, one supposes, the process of the law; or an
over-fed war profiteer stricken with apoplexy at sight of a boat full
of the starved victims of a submarine outrage. You observe perhaps
that the epithet "happy" is one to which the artist and the casual
reader may attach a different significance. But let not anything I
have said be considered as reflecting upon the tales themselves, which
indeed s