Much as I have enjoyed some previous work by Baroness VON HUTTEN I am glad to say that I consider _Magpie_ (HUTCHINSON) her best yet. It is indeed a long time since I read a happier or more holding story. The title is a punning one, as the heroine's name is really _Margaret Pye_, but I am more than willing to overlook this for the sake of the pleasantly-drawn young woman to whom it refers and the general interest of the tale. Briefly, this has two movements, one forward, which deals with the evolution of _Mag_ from a fat, rather down-at-heel little carrier of washing into the charming young lady of the cover; the other retrospective, and concerned with the mystery of a wonderful artist who has disappeared before the story opens. I have no idea of clearing up, or even further indicating, this problem to you. But I will say that the secret is so adroitly kept that the perfect orgy of elucidation in the final chapter left me a little breathless. Of course the whole thing is a fairy tale, with a baker's dozen of glaring improbabilities; but I am much mistaken if you will enjoy it the less for that. A quaint personal touch, which (to anyone who does not recall the cast of _Pinkie and the Fairies_ on its revival) might well seem an impertinence, produced in me the comfortable glow of superiority that rewards the well-informed. But I can assure Baroness VON HUTTEN that she is all wrong about the acting of that particular part. * * * * * As it is not Mr. Punch's habit to admit reviews of periodical publications, I ought to say that the case of _The New Europe_ (CONSTABLE), whose first completed volume lies before me, is exceptional. In thirty years' experience of journalism I never remember a paper containing so much "meat"--some of it pretty strong meat, too--in proportion to its size. In hardly a single week since its first issue in October last have I failed to find between its tangerine-coloured covers some article giving me information that I did not know before, or furnishing a fresh view of something with which I thought myself familiar. And I take it there are many other writers--and even, perhaps, some statesmen--who have enjoyed the same experience. Dr. SETON-WATSON and the accomplished collaborators who march under his orange oriflamme may not always convince us (I am not sure, for example, that _Austria est delenda_ may prove the only or the best prescription for bringing freedom to the Jugo-Slavs of South-Eastern Europe), but they always furnish the reader with the facts enabling him to test their conclusions; and that in these times is a great merit. My own feeling is that if they had begun their concerted labours a few years earlier the War might never have happened; or at least we should have gone into it with a much more accurate notion of the real aims of the Central Powers, and a much better chance of quickly defeating them. The tragedies