er history you are reminded of this circumstance. It
explains much; though hardly her marriage with _Euan Leppington_, whose
attraction apparently lay in being one of the few males of her
acquaintance whom _Sara_ did not find it fatally easy to bring to heel.
Anyhow, after marriage she quickly grew bored to death of him; so much
so that it required an attempt (badly bungled) by another woman to get
_Euan_ to elope with her, and a providential collapse of the very
unwilling Lothario, to bring about that happy ending that my experience
of kind Mr. NORRIS has taught me to expect. I may add that he has never
done anything more quietly entertaining than the frustrated elopement;
the luncheon scene at the Metropole, Brighton, between the angry but
amused _Sara_ and a husband incapacitated by rage, remorse and chill, is
an especially well-handled little comedy of manners.

* * * * *

Sir JULIAN CORBETT, in writing the first volume of _Naval Operations_
(LONGMANS), has carried the semi-official history of the War at sea only
as far as the Battle of the Falklands; but if the other three or four
volumes--the number is still uncertain--are to be as full of romance as
this the complete work will be a library of adventure in itself. Hardly
ever turning aside to praise or blame, he says with almost unqualified
baldness a multitude of astounding things--things we half knew, or
guessed, or longed to have explained, or dared not whisper, or, most of
all, never dreamt of. Here is a gold-mine for the makers of boys' books
of all future generations to quarry in. Think, for instance, of the
liner _Ortega_ shaking off a German cruiser by bolting into an uncharted
tide-race near the Horn; or the _Southport_, left for disabled by her
captors, crawling two thousand miles to safety with only half an engine;
or the triumphant raider _Karlsruhe_, her pursuers baffled, full to the
hatches with captured luxuries, bands playing, flags flying, suddenly
blown up in mid-Atlantic. The game of hide-and-seek, as played by the
_Emden_ and her like, naturally figures very largely in a volume which
HENTY could hardly have bettered. The author's veracious narrative,
leaving all picturesque detail to the imagination, gets home every time
by the sheer weight of its material. The War in Home waters is no less
fascinatingly reconstructed, and the case of maps contains in itself
living epics for all who study them with understanding.