I venture to offer my best compliments both to the cast and to the author, and to hope that his _Searchlights_ may serve well to pierce the shadows of the night through which we are passing. O. S. * * * * * [Illustration: _Tommy_ (_late gamekeeper_). "MARK OVER!"] * * * * * OUR BOOKING-OFFICE. (_By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks._) Miss VIOLA MEYNELL brings to her analysis of character an astonishingly acute observation and insight, an intimate sympathy, a quiet, leavening, sometimes faintly malicious, humour; and to her synthesis a conscientious and dexterous artistry in selection and arrangement which gives a vividly objective reality to her creations. So that you may put down her _Columbine_ (SECKER) with something like the guilty feeling of an eavesdropper. Love in its effect upon three girls is her main theme, and it is difficult to overpraise her skill and restraint in the handling of it. _Lily Peak_, the actress, beautiful, passionless, incompetent, with her irrelevant banality, and her second-hand philosophy of living, is a veritable _tour de force_ of characterisation which cleverly avoids the easy pit of caricature. And between this pretty nonentity and _Jennifer_, the competent, the loyal and the deep, with her occasional flashes of beauty and her innocent provocativeness, _Dixon Parrish_, one of those self-analytic, essentially cool-blooded modern young men, wavers to the tragic hurt of all the three. _Alison_, his sister, full of moodiness and passionate preoccupations, moves unquiet on the well-planned background which holds that genially absurd pseudo-intellectual, her father; the kindly negative _Mrs. Parrish_; _Gilbert_, _Alison's_ lover (the least satisfactory of the portraits); the pleasantly pretentious _Madame Barrett_ of the elocution classes; and "that _Mrs. Smith_," who is only (but adroitly) shown through _Lily's_ artless chatter. Miss MEYNELL chooses to write chiefly of little moments in little lives. But she has adequate reserves of power for bigger work, as passages of warm colour placed with a fine judgment on her low-toned canvas abundantly prove, and meanwhile she has shown herself mistress of a method singularly skilful and restrained. She does not describe or explain or soliloquise. All her points are made through the speech, the actions or the expressed thought of her characters--the manifestly excellent way which so few have the wit or the courage to follow. * * *