nces both
of war and peace with so clear a simplicity that they can be easily
visualized. When the American Army arrived in France Captain Roosevelt
naturally wished to join it, and his last chapter is called "With the
First Division in France and Germany." But for us the main interest of
his book lies in the work he did with the British in Mesopotamia, and to
thank him for this would seem to be an impertinence.

* * * * *

Mr. Arnold Bennett's _From the Log of the Velsa_ (Chatto) deals with
some vague period before the War (dates are most carefully concealed),
when the versatile author undertook certain cruises up and down Dutch
canals, the Baltic, French, Flemish and Danish coasts and East Anglian
estuaries with companions about whom he preserves an equally mysterious
silence. (Was it secret service, I wonder?) A delightful book, produced
with something like pre-war attention to aesthetic appearance--a pleasant
quarto with roomy pages faithfully printed in a fair type. You ought to
enjoy the owner's evident enjoyment (he was never bored and therefore
never boring), his charmingly ingenuous pride of possession, his shrewd,
humorous and excessively didactic utterances about painters, pictures,
architecture and female beauty, his zeal for water-colour sketching and
his apparently profound contempt of other exponents of the craft.
Nothing could be less like (I thank Heaven) the ordinary yachtsman's
recollections of his travels, and I get an impression that Mr. Bennett
was not ill-pleased to leave most of the work and the technical
knowledge to his skipper.

* * * * *

"Crepe de Chine in oyster white will show the top of the dress
embroidered to the knees in some unconventional design of black
and a deeper shade of white."--_Daily Paper_.

"The bridesmaid's dress was of heavy white crepe-de-chine, of
pale apricot shade."--_Provincial Paper_.

Canning must have had a premonition of the modern fashions when
he wrote in _The New Morality_, "Black's not so black, nor white so
_very_ white."

* * * * *

From a bookseller's advertisement:--

"Mr. ---- has the way of when you finish one of his most
interesting books that you really cannot help yourself by
reading all." _Newfoundland Paper._

Not being quite sure whether this is a compliment or not we have
suppressed the distinguished author's n