"The domestic income of a more or less typical three-roomed
cottage near the docks is at present L17 per week. Among the
recent purchases of the family, a pianoforte, costing L50, may
be enumerated, although no one in the house can play a note.
This looks more wasteful than the common outlay on gramophones,
which at least give pleasure. The idea of sound investment is
slow in penetration among the suddenly affluent in wages."

_Liverpool Daily Post and Mercury._

We dislike carping, but surely a piano is always a sound investment.

* * * * *

OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

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

In fiction it is certainly true that nothing succeeds like success.
There is a sure and very understandable charm in a story of climbing
fortunes. Therefore it may be that part of my pleasure in _Tasker
Jevons_ (HUTCHINSON) was due to sympathy with the upward progress of its
hero. But much more was certainly due to the art with which Miss MAY
SINCLAIR has written about it. _Tasker Jevons_ is a book, and a
character, that will linger pleasantly in my memory. He was a little man
with a great personality, or rather I will say a great purpose, and that
was to approve himself in the eyes of the wife whom he worshipped, and
her perplexed, slightly contemptuous family. The trouble was that
_Tasker_ was in the beginning a hack journalist, socially and personally
impossible; and that _Viola Thesiger_, whom he married, belonged by
birth to the rigidest circle of Cathedral society (Miss SINCLAIR,
scorning subterfuge, calls it quite openly Canterbury). So you see the
difficulties that beset the _Jevons_ pair. Their story is told here,
very effectively, through the mouth of a third person, a
fellow-journalist and admirer of _Jevons_--but quite respectable--the
rejected suitor of _Viola_, and eventually the husband of her sister.
Through his clever and observant eyes we watch the progress of _Jevons_,
see him prospering materially, becoming famous and rich and vulgarized.
It is an unusually close and rather subtle study of the development of
such a man. Eventually there happens that for which the date, Midsummer
1914, will have prepared you, even if you had forgotten that Miss
SINCLAIR had herself served in Belgium with a field ambulance. So the
end of the book gives us some vivid War pictures. Taking it all round, I
am inclined to consider _Tasker Jevons_ the bes