ason it is a story more than usually hard to condense fairly into
a paragraph. Briefly, however, the P. T., which was the peculiar
treasure of the noble line of _Annerslie_, lived in a case in the
library of their ancestral home. The heroine, _Anstice_, a relation of
the Family, was employed by My Lord as librarian. When I tell you,
moreover, that _Anstice_ had run away from her own father on finding
that he was an expert manufacturer of literary forgeries, and that her
circle of friends included an American blackmailer, a curiosity dealer
and a mad Italian who was even better at the forgery business than her
own father, you will perceive that the poor girl was likely to find her
situation "some job." I could not begin to tell you what really
happened. Towards the end there had been so much mystery, and the story
had become such a palimpsest of forged signatures, that I myself knew no
more than _Lord Annerslie_ in which to believe. But I think we both had
the upholding conviction that an affair of this kind was bound to come
out all right in the end. Which indeed it did; leaving all the virtuous
characters abundantly satisfied, a feeling that will, I am sure, be
shared by Mrs. Rawson's maze-loving public.

* * * * *

Robert Tressall was a house-painter, a Socialist, and very evidently a
sincere if somewhat raw thinker. He left to his heirs and assigns a
manuscript of many thousand words. It was a novel, oddly entitled _The
Ragged Trousered Philanthropists_ (Grant Richards), and fell into the
hands of Miss Jessie Pope, who recognised the genius in it (none too
strong a word), made some excisions, and now stands sponsor for it to
the world. It is a grim story of the unpicturesque and horribly anxious
lives of working-folk, specifically of the house-painter and his mates
working on a job, elated and satisfied at the beginning, depressed and
despondent as the work nears completion with the uncertainty as to how
long it will be before another job comes along. Nobody who hadn't lived
exclusively in this hard environment could have written with such
candour and intensity. Mr. Tressall has avoided altogether the
pretentiousness and literary affectation that betrayed, for example, Mr.
H. G. Wells' bathchairman, Meeks. The earlier part of the book is better
than the later, where the propagandist ousts the chronicler. The
exposition of Socialist doctrine is made with a considerable if a crude
skill.