enormously enhanced by the fact that all these people are unescapably real. They amuse you, they bore you, they disgust you never for one instant do they cease to live.

Great waves of impossibly brilliant conversation submerge the action for chapters, casual crimes halt it but for a moment-only the War can stem the infernal energy of Welch. When he is broken the charm ceases, the rout of Greenwich-Village-y sensualists dissolves, to find no place in the fierce economies, the courageous discipline of war-time. A futile and disillusioned Edward-with a stomach-is vaguely descried brooding over the ruins of his pose-or sweating his heart out in the ranks of K. I. So the immoral book ends with a moral-leaving behind it the faint but indefinable savor of rotting fruit.

S. V. B.

Open Boats. By Alfred Noyes. (Scribner's; 50 cents net.)

Mr. Noyes is perfectly just in his accusation that in a great war like the present, one is apt to overlook the countless minor tragedies which are enacted in appalling numbers. There are, I feel sure, many, many people, who when they read in the newspapr that eight trawlers have been sunk, receive absolutely no brain-throb whatever. It is for just this sort of person that "Open Boats" is written. There is throughout a lucid, unimpassioned journalistic statement of hard fact, and it seems almost impossible that the same pen which produced the delightful lyrics and almost saccharine poetry could also have written a book which is so totally different. "Open Boats" is intensely interesting from the first to the last page. Particularly is it so in Mr. Noyes' explanation of Teutonic whimsicality. By all means read the book. It is distinctly vivid and timely.

EDITOR'S TABLE.

"Five little sparrows on a fence. Two flew away and then
three more and then there were-"

"O Queen, live forever," said the Rook absently.

But the Queen was no longer there nor the King in Yellow. Royalty had departed for the wars, quite casually, in a spirit of mockery. Wherefore the Rook, who dotes upon days that are gone, began to grow melancholy; and when he is like that he resembles Mrs. Browning, and waves his fingers and there is no standing him.

"Ay me, the pleasant things we shall never do. For instance, we shall never celebrate the birthday of good Victoria. We shall never charter an ancient sea-going hack and ride forth into the apple-orchard country, with a coachman who knew Jane Austen in her younger days and horses who had seen the evening years of the Poet Laureate."

"No," admitted the Pawn snappishly.

"Sh!" said the Red Knight, with great tact.

A flood of recollection began to overwhelm the Rook. He thought of other things the Board could have done.

"Mrs. Sigourney," he began again, "and the death of Mrs. Hemans." "Did she die?" queried the Red Knight sadly. He began to feel a speech coming on him and grew uneasy.

"We who have trod the cliffs of Helicon, and drunk from the springs of Peoria-"

"Pieria," corrected the Pawn.

"You've left out weeping by the waters of Babylon," said the Rook. "Bosh!" said the Pawn profoundly. "The only thing to do in a serious occasion is to be trivial," which is a remark out of the 1890's.

A silence fell, and the three sat staring at the empty chairs.

"I wonder if the Muses will miss us," sighed the Red Knight. "Good old ugly lamp, good old horrible desk, good old stupid LIT.-"

"But you don't mean to say that you two?-" shrieked the Rook, horrified.....

The Chairman was chaunting in the pose of "1814":

"When we hear the blast of trumpet,

When we hear the rolling drum,
Then we know the band is playing,
Then we know that war has come.

"We salute our weeping mother
And we bid the cook good-bye,
And we buckle on our armor
And meander out to die."

"Too happy, happy tree," said the Rook irrelevantly, drifting back once more into the shadows of the Victorian age.

THE PAWN.