_Small Boy._ "PLEASE, ZUR, THE WIND WERE BLOWIN'."] * * * * * OUR BOOKING-OFFICE. (_By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks._) "I remember, I remember...." Still on every side echoes the poet's cry, while scarce a publisher but can prove that the thoughts of age make long, long books. Certainly not the shortest of these, but among the most readable, is _A Medley of Memories_ (ARNOLD), in which the Right Rev. Sir DAVID HUNTER-BLAIR has embodied the recollections of his very active career as Benedictine monk and a leading figure in the world of British Catholicism. Eton, Oxford, Rome, and (of course) his own famous monastery at Fort Augustus, are the chief scenes of it; and about them all Sir DAVID talks vividly, even brilliantly. I am not saying that all this pleasant garrulity would not have been the better for the blue pencil, especially in those chapters in which the writer's memory dwells almost to excess upon the births, marriages, deaths and dinner-parties of the orthodox Peerage. Elsewhere, however, Sir DAVID finds occasion in plenty for the exercise of a wit so dextrously handled that often his thrust is delivered before you have realized that the rapier has left its sheath. I had marked a score of examples for quotation (and now have space for none) and twice as many good stories. In the Oxford recollections it was pleasant to renew my own lively memories of a certain notorious lecture by Mr. WALTER WALSH on Ritualistic Societies, when violence was narrowly averted by the tactful chairmanship of the present LORD CHANCELLOR--a lecture from which (as Mr. BELLOC observed at the time) "each member of the large audience departed confirmed and strengthened in whatever convictions he might previously have entertained." I sincerely hope that Sir DAVID has yet in store for us those latter-day gleanings which he has been compelled to dismiss for the present as being too recent for print. * * * * *