_The Lighter Side of School Life_ (FOULIS) is one of the merriest and shrewdest books that I have met for a long time. Mr. IAN HAY pleasantly dedicates his work "to the members of the most responsible, the least advertised, the worst paid, and the most richly rewarded profession in the world"; and you will not have turned two pages before discovering that the writer of them knows pretty thoroughly what he is writing about. For my own part I claim to have some experience both of schoolmasters and boys, and I can say at once that the former at least have seldom been dealt with more faithfully than by Mr. HAY. His chapter on "Some Form Masters" is a thing of the purest joy; bitingly true, yet withal of a kindly sympathy with his victims. One would say that he knows boys as well, were it not for the conviction that to imagine any kind of understanding of Boydom is (if my contemporaries will forgive me) the last enchantment of the middle-aged, and the most fallacious. As for the Educational experts, he has all the cold and calculated hate for them that is the mark of experience. I admired especially his treatment of the "craze for practical teaching," the theory which holds, for example, that, instead of postulating a fixed relation between the circumference of a circle and its diameter, a teacher should supply his boys with several ordinary tin canisters, a piece of string and a ruler, and leave the form to work out their own result. Decidedly, Mr. HAY has seen _The Lighter Side of School Life_ with the eye of knowledge; and when I mention that your own eyes will here encounter a dozen pictures by Mr. LEWIS BAUMER at his delightful best--well, I suppose, enough said. * * * * * [Illustration: "KAISER BACK TO THE FRONT." (ATTEMPTED ILLUSTRATION TO A RECENT POSTER OF THE EVENING PRESS.)] * * * * *