_Second ditto_. "NO; BUT THAT'LL BE ALL RIGHT. THEY'RE SURE TO COME AGAIN TERMORRER NIGHT."] * * * * * OUR BOOKING-OFFICE. (_BY MR. PUNCH'S STAFF OF LEARNED CLERKS._) Not for a great while have I met a story at once so moving and so simply made as _Summer_ (MACMILLAN). Of course at this time the art of EDITH WHARTON is no new discovery; but to my thinking she has never done better work than this tale of a New England village, and the wakening to love of the girl who was drowsing away her youth there. It is all, as I say, so simple, and written with such apparent economy of effort, that only afterwards does the amazing cleverness of Mrs. WHARTON'S method impress itself upon the reader. _Charity Royall_ was a waif, of worse than ambiguous parentage, brought up in a community where her passionate and violently sensitive nature was stifled. Two men loved her--dour middle-aged Lawyer _Royall_, whose house she kept, and _Lucius Harney_, the young visitor from the city, the fairy-prince of poor _Charity's_ one great romance, through whom came tragedy. You see already the whole stark simplicity of the theme. What I cannot convey to you is that secret of Mrs. WHARTON'S that enables her by some exquisitely right word or phrase so to illuminate a scene that you see it as though by an inspiration of your own, and feel that thus and thus did the thing in fact happen. There are episodes in _Summer_--for example the Fourth of July firework evening, or the wildly macabre scene of the night funeral on the mountain--that seem to me to come as near perfection in their telling as anything I am ever likely to read, and when you have enjoyed them for yourself I fancy you will be inclined to join me in very sincere gratitude for work of such rare quality. * * * * *