Your Blanche is enormously busy just now editing a book that's going to be the sensation of the Spring crop of volumes. You're aware, of course, _m'amie_, that if a book's even to be _looked_ at now it must be either Somebody's Memories of Everybody Else or Somebody's Experiences in an Enemy Country. Well, and so Stella Clackmannan and I, in the hostel we run for poor dears who've lost their situations abroad and have no friends to go to on coming back here, found among our guests a bright little Cockney who's been what she calls an up-and-down girl in the Royal Palace at Bashbang, the capital of Rowdydaria. My dearest, the things that girl has climbed over and crawled under, and the weather she's come through, in escaping from the Rowdydarians and getting back here! And the things she's seen and heard in the Palace! It will throw a flood of light on all sorts of things, and will certainly make our F.O. sit up. With the help of a clever photographer and some imagination we've reconstructed the up-and-down girl's adventures quite nicely. There are photos of the King of Rowdydaria as head of his own army; in his uniform as Colonel of the Hun Raeuberundmoerder Regiment; and in the Arab burnous in which he is to lead an attack on Egypt. There's a photo of the up-and-down girl sweeping a passage and listening through a key-hole to a wonderful conversation between the King of R. and an Emperor who'd come to see him (luckily it was in English and she remembers every word): "You've got to say _you_ did it." "But I haven't got any navy--I _couldn't_ have done it." "I'll give you the submarine that did it--or _lend_ it to you. There! now it's yours--for a time. _You_ don't depend on the Neutralians for any supplies. So you can afford to tell them you did it--and be quick about it." "But you can't expect even the _Neutralians_ to swallow that!" "Why, you fool, they'd swallow anything! That's the meaning of their phrase 'rubber-neck.'" There's a photo of the Queen of Rowdydaria coming up at this point, snatching the broom away, and beating the up-and-down girl with it, and calling her "Spying English Pig." Altogether, my dear, it's positively enthralling! Order your copy early, for people will be slaying each other for this book. _Astounding Disclosures of an Up-and-down Girl in the Royal Palace at Bashbang_ will certainly quite _quite_ eclipse those two other sensations, _What a Buttons Overheard in the Imperial Pickelhaube Schloss_ and _Amazing Revelations of a Tweeny in the Perhapsburg Hof_. Ever thine, BLANCHE. * * * * * [Illustration: "I SAY, OLD GIRL, DO LET ME CARRY SOMETHING."] * * * * * How to put People at their Ease.