"This should bring joy to the heart of every resolutionary Socialist." _The Workers' Dreadnought._ All the Socialists we have met answer to this description. * * * * * [Illustration: ADVENTURES OF A POST-WAR SPORTSMAN. _P.-W. S. (otter-hunting for the first time)._ "TIRED? COOKED TO A TURN! I WOULDN'T 'AVE COME SO FAR BUT ONE OF YOUR CHAPS TOLD ME YOU 'AD A STRONG DRAG UP THE RIVER AND I THOUGHT WE MIGHT ALL GO 'OME IN IT. AND NOW 'E SAYS IT'S ONLY A SMELL 'E MEANT."] * * * * * OUR BOOKING-OFFICE. (_By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks._) I should certainly call Mr. COMPTON MACKENZIE our first living expositor of London in fiction. Indeed the precision with which, from his Italian home, he can recapture the aspect and atmosphere of London neighbourhoods is itself an astonishing feat. In _The Vanity Girl_ (CASSELL) he has happily abandoned the rather breathless manner induced by the migratious _Sylvia Scarlett_, and returns to the West Kensington of _Sinister Street_, blended subsequently with that theatrical Bohemia in which _Jenny Pearl_ danced her little tragedy. There is something (though by no means all) of the interest of _Carnival_ in the new stage story; that the adventures of _Dorothy_ lack the compelling charm of her predecessor is inevitable from the difference in temperament of the two heroines and the fact that Mr. MACKENZIE with all his art has been unable to rouse more than dispassionate interest in what is really a study of successful egotism. From the moment when, in the first chapter, we encounter _Dorothy_ (whose real name was _Norah_) washing her hair at a window in Lonsdale Road, an eligible _cul-de-sac_ ending in a railway line, beyond which a high rampart marked the reverse of the Earl's Court Exhibition panorama, to that final page on which we take leave of her as a widowed countess, sacrificing her future for the sake of an Earl's Court of a different _genre_, her career, sentimental, financial and matrimonial, is told with amazing vivacity but a rather conspicuous lack of emotional appeal. It is perhaps an unequal book; in parts as good as the author's best, in others hurried and perfunctory. One of our more superior Reviews was lately debating Mr. MACKENZIE'S command of the "memorable phrase." There are a score here that I should delight to quote, even if the setting is not always entirely worthy of them. ***