* * * * * "WANTED.--Comfortable Home with private family for Gentleman who is not strong in Brighton, Eastbourne, or St. Leonards." _The Times._ The poor fellow should try Bournemouth or Torquay. * * * * * GETTING EVEN. [Illustration: _Outraged victim of "Confidential Report" (being put to bed prematurely_). "Please, God, Nurse _sewed_ for her soldier on SUNDAY!"] * * * * * OUR BOOKING-OFFICE. (_By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks._) If it should ever be your lot, which pray Heaven forbid, to be stranded on the coast of Panama, seek out Miss WINIFRED JAMES as your hostess, for she can teach you how to tolerate, and even in a way enjoy, an existence one might have thought unendurable. She lives, I gather, some two hundred miles or so from the Canal, in a town that is going to be built some fine day on a site that has to be prepared by filling up a marsh with clay and sand. In the meantime, until the day and the town arrive, she rightly describes herself as _A Woman in the Wilderness_ (CHAPMAN AND HALL). Civilisation is turned back to front out there, for although such comforts as refrigerators and electric light are a matter of course, there is still lacking to _Mrs. Henry de Jan_ and her rather shadowy _William_ anything, for instance, in the nature of a road on which to walk, or indeed any approach to their own verandah except, floating on the clay, a narrow plank gangway that has to serve as a hustling high-road for a mixed and dusky populace. Under the circumstances she has done nobly well to arm herself with the twin defences of cheerfulness and humour; and if the cheerfulness comes at times near to being that of a martyr on the rack, while the fun is perilously apt to swing from themes that are nice for a lady's wit to others that are not so nice, and back to sheer triviality, what, in the name of a population of sand-flies and negroes, can you expect? It is much that so lifelike a picture of a region so desolate should be presented on the whole with sweetness and charm, when no better material is available than the myriad misdeeds of her coloured servants, the antics of her puppies and an occasional reminiscence of home. * * * * *