When _Dicky Furlong_, the brilliant and aspiring artist of _The Achievement_ (CHAPMAN AND HALL) who was in love with _Diana Charteris_, sloshed her husband, _Lord Freddy_, over the head with his own decanter (_vide_ Chap. XXI.) he rather overdid it. For "the jagged thing fell with a sullen thud behind his (_Lord Freddy's_) ear," and that discourteous nobleman collapsed to rise no more. When the detective arrived the following noon he convinced himself that there was no necessity to detain any of the guests, even though no windows had been found open or doors unlocked, and though Dicky had a contused lip from the conflict overnight and everybody had coupled his name with _Diana's_. However, the methodical sleuthhound ran his quarry to earth a year or two later, just as he had put the finishing touches to his great (seventeen-foot) canvas. And _Dicky_ took a little bottle out of his pocket. In fact, our old friend the novelette, with its unexacting canons of plausibility; tacked on, as it happens, to twenty chapters of meandering incident, a long way after the well-known Five-Towns formula, garnished with pleasantly romantic little notices of _Dicky's_ pictures and _Dicky's_ love affairs. But you don't begin to see the _Dicky_ of the decanter phase (even though a fight about an ill-treated dog is lugged in for the purpose), or indeed any other _Dicky_ of real flesh and blood, in this haphazard selection of episodes and comments. The truth is there is more in that difficult and dangerous formula than Mr. TEMPLE THURSTON is aware of. He has wandered into the wrong galley. A pity. For _Mrs. Flint_ is a dear, if a stupid dear, and _Dicky_ himself has his points. * * * * * Illustration: _The Old Man._ "I SEE BY THE PAPER HERE THAT THE ROOSHIANS ARE ATTACKING A TOWN THEY SPELL P-R-Z-E-M-Y-S-L. D'YE THINK, NOW, WUD THAT BE A MISTAKE OF THE PRINTER'S OR WUD THE LETTERS OF IT BE MIXED UP, LIKE, WI' THE BOMBARDMENT?" * * * * * OUR DAILY BREAD. [_The London correspondent of a German paper announces that London is on the verge of starvation, his own diet being "reduced to bread and rancid dripping."_] "There is a languor in this alien air; We are reduced, in fact, to famine fare; Mine, I may say, is dripping based on bread (Ugh!), and I gather I shall soon be dead. It is the same all over, East or West; Hungry each hollow just below the chest. Daily, I'm told, they rake the very dust, Hoping in vain to come across a crust. And, when our God-born WILHELM brings his Huns Here, he will find a few odd skeletons." Such is the tale a Teuton lately writ. How, then, I ask, does London look so fit? This is the reason, mainly, I surmise-- We are fed up, of course, with German Lies. * * * * *