HOW TO UTILISE THE ART OF "SUGGESTION."
The Doctor, six down at the turn, "suggests" to his opponent that they are playing croquet, and wins by two and one."
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
Tents of a Night (Smith, Elder) is a quite ordinary story, about entirely commonplace persons, which has however an original twist in it. I never met a story that conveyed so vividly the nastiness of a summer holiday that isn't nice. The holiday was in Brittany, just the common round, Cherbourg, Coutances, Mont St. Michel, and the rest of it; and the holiday-makers were Mr. and Mrs. Hepburn, their niece Anna, and a rather pleasant flapper named Barbara whom they had taken in charge. Anne is the heroine and central character of the holiday; and certainly whatever discomforts it contained she seems to have done her successful best to add to. "This is a beastly place!" was her written comment upon St. Michel; and it was typical of her attitude throughout. Of course the real trouble with Anne was something deeper than drains or crowded hotels or the smell of too many omelettes; she was in love. Apparently she was more or less in love with two men, Dragotin Voinovich (whose name was a constant worry to Anne's aunt, and I am bound to say that I share her feelings about it) and Jimmy Fordyce, a pleasant young Englishman who pulls the girls out of quicksands and makes himself generally agreeable. In the end, however—but on second thoughts the end, emotionally speaking, of Anne is just what I shall not tell you, as it is precisely the thing that redeems the book from being commonplace. This you will enjoy; and also those remarkably real descriptions of various plage-hotels in August, the noise, the crowds, the long hot meals, the sunshine and constant wind, the sand on the staircase, and the general atmosphere of wet bathing-gowns—all these are a luxurious delight to read about in a comfortable English room. Miss Mary Findlater evidently knows them.
Dippers who have given a new meaning to the classical motto, Respice finem, are so common amongst novel readers that Patricia Wentworth will only have herself to thank if many who are unfamiliar with her work fair to do justice to a book nine-tenths of which is thoroughly interesting and excellently well-written. As a boy, the hero of Simon Heriot (Melrose) is musunderstood, and although Mr. Martin, his step-father, is a somewhat stagey specimen of the heavy and vulgar papa, the child's emotions (as, for instance, when he pretends that the storm of his parent's wrath is the ordeal of the Inquisition or some far-away battle of paladins in which he is contending) are finely conceived, and many of the later passages in Simon's life—his unhappy love affair with Maud Courtney, his relations with his grandmother and with William Forster, the schoolmaster—are quite engrossing and give occasion for memorable sketches of character. It is when the natural end of the story is reached, and Simon has come into his own and has just been wedded to his proper affinity, that the structure seems to me to fall with a crash. I might perhaps, though not without reluctance, have pardoned an impertinent railway accident which leaves the young man apparently
