WALLOWED THE COLLECTION."]

* * * * *

OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

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

Inevitably you will find a sad significance in the title of _Harvest_
(COLLINS), the last story, I suppose, that we shall have from the pen of
Mrs. HUMPHREY WARD. It is a quite simple tale, very simply told, and of
worth less for its inherent drama than for the admirable picture it gives
of rural England in the last greatest days of the Great War. How quick was
the writer's sympathy with every phase of the national ordeal is proved
again by a score of vivid passages in which the fortunes of her characters
are dated by the tremendous events that form their background. The story
itself is of two women in partnership on a Midland farm, one of whom, the
senior, has in her past certain secret episodes which, as is the way of
such things, return to find her out and bring her happiness to ruin. The
character of this _Janet_ is well and vigorously drawn, though there is
perhaps little in her personality as shown here to make understandable the
passion of her past. All the details of life on the land in the autumn of
1918 are given with a skill that brings into the book not only the scent of
the wheat-field but the stress, emotional and economic, of those
unforgettable months. Because it is all so typically English one may call
it a true consummation of the work of one who loved England well. In Mrs.
WARD'S death the world of letters mourns the loss of a writer whose talent
was ever ungrudgingly at the service of her country. She leaves a gap that
it will be hard to fill.

* * * * *

In some ways I think that they will be fortunate who do not read _A Remedy
Against Sin_ (HUTCHINSON) till the vicissitudes of book-life have deprived
it of its pictorial wrapper, because, though highly attractive as a
drawing, the very charmingly-clad minx of the illustration is hardly a
figure to increase one's sympathy with her as an injured heroine. And of
course it is precisely this sympathy that Mr. W. B. MAXWELL is playing
for--first, last and all the time. His title and the puff's preliminary
will doubtless have given you the aim of the story, "to influence the
public mind on one of the most vital questions of the day," the injustice
of our divorce laws. For this end Mr. MAXWELL has exercised all his ability
on the picture of a foolish young wife, chained to a lout who is s