xt time we've to cross lemme be
roon ower!"]

* * * * *

OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

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

_Double Life_ (Grant Richards) is a story that unblushingly bases its
appeal on the love of almost everyone for a fairy-tale of good fortune.
The matter of it is to show how a lady amateur, wife of a novelist,
herself hardly knowing one end of a horse from the other, might make
forty thousand pounds in a year on the Turf, without even her own
husband so much as suspecting her activities. The thing isn't likely, is
indeed a fantasy of the wildest improbability; but, told with the zest
imparted to it here by Mr. Grant Richards, it provides first-rate fun.
Some danger of monotony there was bound to be in what is really a
variation upon a single theme. Though the author cunningly avoids this,
I think it might justly be observed that he has made _Olivia's_ plunges
almost too uniformly successful. But perhaps not; after all, while you
are handling fairy-gold, why be niggardly of it? The heroine's
introduction to horse-racing comes about through the unconscious agency
of her husband, who takes her with him on a visit to Newmarket in search
of local colour for a "sporting" novel. The resulting situation reaches
its climax in what is the best scene of the book, when _Geoffrey_,
returning from a race that he has visited alone, but upon which
_Olivia_, unknown to him, has risked thousands, recounts its progress in
the best manner of realistic fiction, wholly ignorant of the true cause
of what seems such flattering agitation in the listener. Altogether a
happy if not very subtle story which I am glad that Mr. Grant Richards
could persuade himself to publish.

To write, as Mr. R.W. Chambers has written, fifty-two novels, many of
them excellent and all readable, while still on the right side of sixty,
is an achievement of intelligent industry that entitles any novelist, at
the latter end, to take matters a little easily. _The Moonlit Way_
(Appleton) has neither the imaginative qualities of _The King in
Yellow_, the humour of _In Search of the Unknown_, nor the adventurous
tang of _Ashes of Empire_, but it is a good live story that will carry
the reader's interest to the last page. Mr. Chambers is at his best when
dealing with spies and secret service agents and scheming chancellors
and the other subterranean apparatus of war and diplomacy; at his least
interesting when depicti