* * * * * [Illustration: _Town Lady._ "BY-THE-BY, SIR WILLIAM, DO TELL ME. I'VE BEEN WONDERING ALL THE AFTERNOON HOW YOU TELL THE TIME BY THIS SUNDIAL."] * * * * * OUR BOOKING-OFFICE. (_By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks._) If you only like listening to a talker with whom you agree, who is of your type and school, then don't bother with _What is Coming?_ (CASSELL), which purports to be H. G. WELLS'S forecasts of things after the War. It's perhaps hardly so serious as that, but just good speculative talk, the kind that offers the first thing that is signalled to the lips from a quick reflective brain without pauses to consider objections by the way. Yet perhaps, after all, the author cannot be dismissed too lightly as a prophet. He did see further into the air than most, at the time when the experts were blandly proving all sorts of impossibilities; and, as he recalls, he made a lucky shot in foretelling the immobility of trench warfare. He still believes in the BLOCH deadlock, and gives victory to the Allies merely for better staying power. For British training and method he naturally has nothing but scorn, which takes him further than most of us can follow him. At least when he says that the university-trained class has been found "under the fiery test of war an evasive, temporising class of people, individualistic, ungenerous and unable either to produce or obey vigorous leadership," he badly needs to justify the confining of that diagnosis to _that_ particular class. And when he further says of British administration of subject territories that "the British are a race coldly aloof. They have nothing to give a black people and no disposition to give"--well, it isn't an obvious truth. These are blemishes of a kind to which a quick-thinking man, a little too anxious to set everybody right by wholesale methods, is naturally subject. But you will miss a good deal of fresh-air sanity, of illumination (for the man _can_ see and find the vivid phrase to express his vision) on war and peace and education and feminism and internationalism and citizenship, if you let yourself be alienated by such lapses. So please don't. * * * * *